Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by RocketMan » Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:52 am
seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 4:50 pm wrote:I was not deflecting I was stating the truth ...your problem is not with pics it is who is posting them
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:53 am
by RocketMan » Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:54 am
seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 4:53 pm wrote:did Elvis pics make it difficult for you to read this why didn't you complain when he posted three pics...oh because four is one too many
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:55 am
seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 8:45 am wrote:Belligerent Savant
Elvis posted 3 pics on page 2 .....i guess that you didn't think that was a problem but 4 is way too much for you
Wombaticus Rex
semper occultus
cptmarginal
backtoiam
American Dream
stillrobertpaulsen
Rory
Grizzly
have all posted pics in this thread.....I think I understand your objection
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 10:02 am
Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office recuses itself from Jeffrey Epstein case
Julie K. Brown
Just days before a Friday deadline, the Justice Department has reassigned the Jeffrey Epstein victims’ rights case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta, the attorneys representing Epstein’s victims said Tuesday.
Miami federal prosecutors, in a letter to attorneys for the victims on Monday, said they had recused themselves from the case, according to Bradley Edwards and Jack Scarola, representing Epstein’s victims.
The reassignment means that the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Byung J. “BJay” Pak, will oversee the case for the government. Pak, a former Georgia lawmaker, was appointed Atlanta’s chief federal prosecutor by President Donald Trump in October 2017.
The Justice Department is still under a Friday deadline for prosecutors to confer with the victims’ attorneys in an effort to settle the case. On Feb. 22, U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra in Palm Beach County ruled that federal prosecutors, under former Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, broke the law when they concealed a plea agreement from more than 30 underage girls in Palm Beach who had been sexually abused by Epstein, a multimillionaire New York hedge fund manager.
Marra stopped short of voiding the agreement, which granted Epstein and an untold number of accomplices immunity from federal prosecution for sex trafficking crimes, provided Epstein plead guilty to minor charges in state court. At the time of the plea deal, federal prosecutors had gathered enough evidence against Epstein to write a 53-page federal indictment, court records show.
The story behind a Palm Beach sex offender’s remarkable deal
Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, despite sexually abusing dozens of underage girls according to police and prosecutors. His victims have never had a voice, until now.
An investigation by the Miami Herald, “Perversion of Justice,’’ found that after Acosta met privately with one of Epstein’s lawyers, the government agreed to seal the plea agreement so that no one — not the victims, not even the state court judge who sentenced Epstein — would know the full extent of his crimes. Epstein, now 66, was allowed to plead guilty to prostitution charges and served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, where he was given liberal work release, and allowed to travel to New York and his private island in the Caribbean during his subsequent house arrest. He was released in 2009, and now divides his time between New York, Palm Beach and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Herald interviewed four of Epstein’s victims, who were as young as 13 at the time they were abused by Epstein. They said they felt betrayed by state and federal prosecutors, who treated them like prostitutes instead of victims. Two of them sued the federal government in 2008 under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which grants crime victims the right to be informed about plea deals and to confer with prosecutors.
Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said prosecutors not only intentionally violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but they misled the girls into believing that the FBI’s sex trafficking case against Epstein was ongoing — when, in fact, prosecutors had secretly closed it after sealing the plea bargain from the public record.
Marra, noting that he reviewed affidavits, depositions and interrogatories, said “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.’’
The victims’ attorneys — Edwards, Scarola and Paul Cassell — have asked the Justice Department to throw out Epstein’s plea agreement and reopen the criminal investigation.
Edwards, who brought the victims’ rights case against the government, said transferring the case to another jurisdiction is a prudent decision.
“I think it’s good that we’re going to get fresh eyes and a fresh opinion on the way the case was handled,’’ Edwards said Tuesday. “We were obviously in an adversarial posture with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami because they handled the case to begin with.’’
Miami’s new U.S. Attorney, Ariana Fajardo Orshan — who was appointed by President Trump in September — did not respond to a request for comment.
Jeffrey Epstein apologizes, but not to his victims
Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire who molested dozens of underage girls, and is suspected of trafficking countless other girls around the world, issued a public apology Tuesday. It was not to the victims of his abuse, but to one of their lawyers.
Edwards predicted that it would take some time for Pak’s office to review the case, which includes more than 500 docket entries and thousands of documents. He said if the sides can’t agree on a resolution, then Marra would likely have to come up with one. The case is being closely watched by crime victims’ rights advocates, as it will likely set a precedent.
download.jfif
Byung Jin ‘BJay’ Pak. the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, will inherit the existing Epstein case from Miami’s U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Acosta, who was appointed by Trump as the U.S. secretary of labor in 2017, is the focus of a separate Justice Department investigation into whether there was any prosecutorial misconduct in the Epstein case. That probe, by the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was initiated in response to demands from a bipartisan group in Congress, led by Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.
In the meantime, a court hearing will be held at 4 p.m. Wednesday in New York in another Epstein-related case. A federal appeals court will hear oral arguments in a motion by the Miami Herald, supported by 32 other news organizations, asking the court to unseal documents that could reveal details about the extent of Epstein’s crimes and any other people who may have been involved.
Three of Epstein’s former attorneys — who helped negotiate his plea deal in 2008 — wrote a letter published in The New York Times on Monday defending the plea bargain cut with Acosta as a fair deal. The letter was in response to a Times editorial that called on Congress and the Trump administration to hold Acosta and others involved in the case accountable.
Epstein’s lawyers said the editorial’s conclusions were “in profound conflict with the reality,’’ noting that there was no evidence that Epstein committed federal sex trafficking offenses. The letter was signed by former Epstein lawyers Kenneth Starr, Jack Goldberger and Lilly Ann Sanchez, as well as Epstein’s current attorney, Martin G. Weinberg.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politi ... 36459.html
How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime
Julie K. Brown
Nov. 28, 2018 | En español
The story behind a Palm Beach sex offender’s remarkable deal
Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, despite sexually abusing dozens of underage girls according to police and prosecutors. His victims have never had a voice, until now.
How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime
Perversion of Justice logo
A decade before #MeToo, a multimillionaire sex offender from Florida got the ultimate break.
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 as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s waterfront Palm Beach home on El Brillo Way. in addition to his Palm Beach home, Epstein owns a residence in New York City and on a private island in the U.S. Islands. Epstein has been accused of molesting hundreds of young girls in his homes.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose , 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 .
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 .
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 . 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.
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Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida when he negotiated an end to the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.
Florida International University
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.
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Courtney Wild, 30, was a victim of serial sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein beginning at the age of 14. Epstein paid Wild, and many other underage girls, to give him massages, often having them undress and perform sexual acts. Epstein also used the girls as recruiters, paying them to bring him other underage girls.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
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.
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The Miami Herald obtained thousands of FBI and court records, lawsuits, and witness depositions, and went to federal court in New York to access sealed documents in the reporting of "Perversion of Justice." The Herald also tracked down more than 60 women who said they were victims, some of whom had never spoken of the abuse before.
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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.
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Jena Lisa Jones spends time with her 18-month-old son Raymond. Jones says that she is a victim of sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Jones says she was just 14 when she was introduced to Epstein and was paid $200 by him to give him a massage at his home. Jones says Epstein told her to take off all of her clothes and that he fondled her during the massage. Epstein pleaded guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14. Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He served 13 months at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office Stockade Facility, much of the time outside of the gates on ‘work release.’
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
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.
How a teen runaway became one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims
Virginia Roberts was working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited to be a masseuse to Palm Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. She was lured into a life of depravity and sexual abuse.
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.
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Attorney Brad Edwards is representing several young women who were sexually abused as minors by Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Edwards Ft. Lauderdale law office is packed with files for the Epstein case.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
“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.
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Jeffrey Epstein, accused of being a serial abuser of underage women, grins for his mugshot. He once compared his alleged crimes to ‘stealing a bagel.’
Florida sex offender registry
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.
Joe Recarey 01 Epstein EKM.jpg
Former Palm Beach County Police Detective Joe Recarey was the lead detective on the solicitation-of-minors case against billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
“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.
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Michael Reiter is the former Chief of Police in Palm Beach. Reiter was Chief during the investigation of Palm Beach resident Jeffrey Epstein.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
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.”
Where are they now? The biggest players in the Jeffrey Epstein case
The girls who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein and the cops who championed their cause remain angry over what they regard as a gross injustice, while Epstein's employees and those who engineered his non-prosecution agreement have prospered.
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.
Epstein plane 01 EKM.jpg
Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane, which is painted a distinctive shade of blue, is parked at Palm Beach International Airport Thursday morning, May 24, 2018. The plane landed at the airport Wednesday May 23, 2018.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
“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.
Mike Fisten 01 Epstein EKM.jpg
Mike Fisten is a private investigator for victims’ attorneys in the sexual abuse cases against Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Emily Michot emichot@miamiherald.com
“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.
Support investigative journalism
The Miami Herald obtained thousands of FBI and court records, lawsuits, and witness depositions, and went to federal court in New York to access sealed documents in the reporting of "Perversion of Justice." The Herald also tracked down more than 60 women who said they were victims, some of whom had never spoken of the abuse before.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 97825.html
by Elvis » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:35 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:41 am
and RocketMan definitely saw them and was not bothered by them by RocketMan » Wed Mar 06, 2019 8:52 am
All I know is you're someone who is making it very difficult for me to enjoy a messageboard I like. BY YOUR ACTIONS.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 07, 2019 10:10 am
PEDO PREDATOR
Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, and Pals Accused of Sex-Trafficking Ring
A lawyer for one of Epstein’s victims claims he was part of sex-trafficking ring with Dershowitz and others—but the Harvard attorney says sealed documents will prove his innocence.
Kate Briquelet
03.06.19 8:23 PM ET
Rick Friedman
Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz was accused of involvement in billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring by an attorney for one of Epstein’s victims, who claimed in federal court on Wednesday that the release of sealed documents will prove it.
Paul Cassell, who represents Virginia Roberts Giuffre, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that the testimony of other witnesses will show Dershowitz’s involvement in the alleged trafficking of “his close friend Jeffrey Epstein.”
“When all the records come out it will show that Epstein and [Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine] Maxwell were trafficking girls to the benefit of his friends, including Mr. Dershowitz,” Cassell said in oral arguments for a case filed by the Miami Herald to unseal a collection of court documents relating to Giuffre’s now settled lawsuit against Maxwell.
ABUSERS
How a Billionaire Predator and Trump Pal Escaped #MeToo
Kate Briquelet
The hearing came nearly two weeks after a Florida judge ruled federal prosecutors violated the law when they inked a non-prosecution deal with Epstein in 2007—and concealed that agreement from more than 30 of Epstein’s victims. The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the secret deal, which was handled by Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who was U.S. Attorney in Miami at the time.
Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, was one member of Epstein’s legal team that helped broker the unusual non-prosecution agreement.
For his part, Dershowitz and his lawyers are also requesting the court release the trove of documents to the public—but they say it’s in order to prove his innocence.
Outside the courtroom, Dershowitz railed against Giuffre and her attorneys, accusing them of fabricating Giuffre’s claims that Epstein forced her to have sex with Dershowitz. He alluded to emails between Giuffre and a friend that he claims will reveal Giuffre made up the claims against Dershowitz at the behest of her lawyers.
“I’ve denied ever meeting her or even knowing who she was,” Dershowitz said.
Moments later, he added of Giuffre, “She is hurting the #MeToo movement terribly. This was all about money and undercuts the many people who are victimized.”
“She is hurting the #MeToo movement terribly.”
— Alan Dershowitz, speaking about one of Epstein's victims
Asked if he still represents Epstein, Dershowitz said, “I don’t represent Epstein” before walking back his answer: “You never stop being someone’s lawyer.”
“I was his lawyer until this deal was made,” Dershowitz added, before claiming he hasn’t seen Epstein in years.
As The Daily Beast previously reported, Epstein faced life behind bars for his alleged sex acts with minors but walked away with a slap on the wrist, pleading guilty to two state charges: solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution. The 66-year-old financier served 13 months of his 18-month sentence in a private wing of a Palm Beach jail and was allowed to leave on “work release” for 16 hours each day.
A recent Miami Herald investigation identified more than 80 women who claim they were molested by Epstein via a “sex pyramid scheme” from 2001 to 2006, at his Palm Beach mansion and elsewhere, though the number of victims is likely in the hundreds. Indeed, Epstein’s former butler kept a black book containing the names of hundreds of girls and young women that the billionaire recruited for sex and massages, the Herald reported.
Epstein hired girls as young as 13 to give him massages. Once they arrived at his home, he would molest his victims or masturbate, according to court records and police reports. In some cases, he forced his victims into intercourse with him or a young woman he called his Yugoslavian sex slave. After his sickening assaults, Epstein allegedly paid the girls $200 or $300, though sometimes as much as $1,000.
One of those victims was Giuffre, who claims she was 15 and working a summer job at Mar-a-Lago in 1998 when British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly recruited her as a masseuse for Epstein. Giuffre said Epstein kept her as a “sex slave” until 2002 and that she was forced to have sex with his friends, including Prince Andrew and Dershowitz. (Both men have adamantly denied the allegations.)
In September 2015, Giuffre filed a defamation suit against Maxwell after she called Giuffre’s claims “obvious lies” and, according to the complaint, “undertook a concerted and malicious campaign to discredit Giuffre and to so damage her reputation that Giuffre’s factual reporting of what had happened to her would not be credited.” The case settled in May 2017, records show.
In April 2018, the Miami Herald asked a federal judge in New York to unseal all documents that had been sealed or redacted in the suit.
“Though two previous motions to unseal have been denied, the reasoning underlying the denial—the imminence of trial, and potential impact on a jury—is no longer relevant because the case has been settled,” one lawyer for the Herald stated in court papers.
Before the Herald filed motions to intervene, Dershowitz and far-right podcaster Michael Cernovich also asked to unseal certain documents. It’s unclear which specific documents Dershowitz wanted to make public because his motion was partially redacted. Cernovich asked the court to unseal Maxwell’s summary judgment pleadings. The court denied both their requests, and they appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
On Wednesday, Sanford Bohrer, an attorney for the Herald, requested the 167 sealed documents in the case be sent to the district court and each one be reviewed for redactions before being released to the public. “Mr. Epstein for good or bad is a focus of some things that are really important today,” Bohrer said.
“Dershowitz and far-right podcaster Michael Cernovich also asked to unseal certain documents.”
Ty Gee, a lawyer for Maxwell, indicated his client was the only party who opposed unsealing the court records and pushed for the panel to stick with U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet’s decision to keep the records secret.
Gee claimed Giuffre has “woven” a story that’s “become more exotic” all for the sake of making money. “It’s almost like I see a name in the news and I’m going to make an allegation against them,” Gee said.
Cernovich’s attorney, Marc Randazza, declared to the court, “All we have is Maxwell to overcome,” before holding up a black-lined redacted document and comparing the court records to “FOIA documents from the CIA.” The panel asked Randazza about Cernovich’s credentials and whether he should have the same rights as a journalist.
After Randazza spoke, Cassell said he would describe Cernovich as a self-professed “slut-shamer” and “a proxy or a stand-in for Mr. Dershowitz.” The only reason Cernovich filed motions requesting a release of the documents was because Dershowitz tried to do so himself and failed, Cassell told the panel. (This statement prompted Dershowitz, who was seated in the gallery, to whisper, “He’s defaming me in court.”)
Dershowitz’s attorney, Andrew Celli, asked for three documents pertaining to his client to be released immediately because the 81-year-old professor’s “reputation has been besmirched.” Celli denied Dershowitz was collaborating with Cernovich.
“Let me be absolutely clear: Mr. Dershowitz is happy and prepared and eager to unseal all documents in this case no matter what they say about him,” Celli said. “He believes, your honor, in the marketplace of ideas.”
Meanwhile, a collection of news outlets and First Amendment and free press groups filed a brief in support of the Herald’s appeal. The organizations included Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Associated Press Media Editors, POLITICO, FOX Television Stations, and the Washington Post, among multiple others.
“Contrary to the district court’s concern that public access to the Summary Judgment Documents will serve only to ‘promote scandal,’ access will provide the public and the press with information key to their understanding of this litigation, which relates to allegations of serial sexual assault and abuse of minors by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and has implicated high-level public officials and public figures,” the brief stated.
The public interest in the case “is particularly acute due to the variety of public figures and public officials who are alleged to be connected to Jeffrey Epstein and his victims,” the brief added, “such as President Donald Trump, former-President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and Alan Dershowitz.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-e ... cking-ring
by seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 08, 2019 4:17 pm
LuluLemew
Thread of transcribed audio (not in order) from the NY Epstein/Maxwell unsealing case yesterday involving @AlanDersh.
Dersh only wants 3 docs unsealed. Cassell, Giuffre’s atty is arguing for all to be unsealed.
Thanks to @KlasfeldReports and @Agenthades1 for audio clips
You agree with the opening of the whole record...
Cassell: ...We think when ALL the records come out it will show that Epstein & Maxwell were trafficking my client Ms Giuffre to the powerful friends...including @AlanDersh.
So you’re not interested in giving [Dersh] the 3 documents he wants now...
Cassell: Well, we should get OUR documents out now...we should get the docs showing...
You’re not interested in piecemeal disclosure...
Cassell: CORRECT...
[00:31] Cassell: We want the documents out now that show Mr @AlanDersh’s involvement in the sex TRAFFICKING. If those came out now immediately along with the 3 he wants, we’d be perfectly happy.
[00:40] Cassell: It’s unfair for [@AlanDersh] to cherrypick 3 docs out of 100s, many of which are going to show the full breadth of this...
[crosstalk says well those are the only ones that implicate him...he thinks ATTY: NOPE]
Are you saying [@AlanDersh] is implicated in OTHER documents?
Cassell: ABSOLUTELY! There are other WITNESSES & THOSE are the docs WE want to come out to show his involvement in the sex trafficking of his close friend #JeffreyEpstein
https://twitter.com/Agenthades1/status/ ... 0947698689
ADAM KLASFELD
The 2nd Circuit released roughly 70 minutes of audio from arguments to unseal Epstein-related files.
You can hear the full proceedings, but I flagged a few key moments.
LISTEN: Judge scoffs at leaving full record sealed. "You can't possibly be serious."
AUDIO: Epstein accuser's attorney Paul Cassell describes blogger Mike Cernovich as a "slut-shamer" who signed up as Alan Dershowitz's "proxy" and "cat's paw" to discredit the women.
AUDIO: Dershowitz's attorney Andrew Celli defends his client's "honor," as judge cheekily asks whether Dersh is part of Cernovich's "slut-shaming cabal."
Later, Cassell claims that records will show "Mr. Dershowitz's involvement in the sex trafficking."
Panel Signals Epstein Files Likely to See Sunlight
ADAM KLASFELDMarch 6, 2019
MANHATTAN (CN) – The Second Circuit appeared inclined on Wednesday to unseal an enormous tranche of documents that would shed light on the case of wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whose case a federal court recently decided trampled on the rights of dozens of underage victims.
Jeffrey Epstein. (Photo via Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department)
“There is a presumption of openness with virtually every document,” declared the Miami Herald’s attorney Sanford Bohrer, urging for the release of 167 files that neither he nor his client are allowed to see.
Deeply skeptical of the secrecy demands of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a British-born socialite accused of organizing his underage sex parties, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit appeared to agree with the need for transparency.
“Is there anything that can be unsealed in this case?” U.S. Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes asked Maxwell’s attorney Ty Gee.
Before Gee could finished answering no, Cabranes interjected: “You can’t possibly be serious.”
The other judges on the panel, U.S. Circuit Judges Rosemary Pooler and Christopher Droney, appeared equally dubious about that proposition.
Referring to the federal ruling that brought them to court, Judge Droney suggested that there was no justification for the wholesale secrecy.
“Where are the specific findings for the 167 documents?” the judge asked.
The case journeyed to the Second Circuit from a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s accusers Virginia Giuffre, now Virginia Roberts.
Describing herself as a former Epstein “sex slave,” Giuffre sued in 2015 before the case settled with a largely sealed record two years later. Giuffre later agreed to appear in a video interview for The Herald’s award-winning investigative series “Perversion of Justice,” which reported that President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta helped Epstein’s star-studded defense team land their client a non-prosecution agreement. The plea deal protected Epstein’s co-conspirators, kept him out of federal prison, and hid the details of the agreement from dozens of alleged victims.
Pursuing the story, The Herald tried to pry open the record in the Giuffre’s case before U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet, who this past August rejected the request to unseal documents “given the highly sensitive nature of the underlying allegations.”
“Documents designated confidential included a range of allegations of sexual acts involving plaintiff and non-parties to this litigation, some famous, some not,” Sweet wrote in a 41-page.
Before entering into a settlement, Giuffre had claimed that Maxwell trafficked her to Epstein’s associates, including his high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz.
Dershowitz vehemently denies the allegations and now joins The Herald and Giuffre in broadly unsealing the files.
“If you put the whole record out, his name is cleared,” Bohrer said, summarizing Dershowitz’s position. “If you don’t, he’s smeared.”
Giuffre’s attorney Paul Cassell, a law professor and former federal judge, disputed that narrative and said that the full record would show his client was “trafficked” to Dershowitz.
Also thrown into the mix of the litigation is Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and blogger known for peddling Pizzagate, a theory that high-ranking Democratic party operatives participated in child-sex ring operated in a Washington pizzeria.
Judge Pooler asked Cernovich’s attorney Marc Randazza whether his client needed to prove his journalistic credibility to gain access to the documents.
Seizing the opportunity to bash the mainstream press, Randazza said that showing would eliminate The New York Times after Judith Miller’s inaccurate reporting led to the Iraq War.
“Journalism is a thing you do rather than a thing you are,” Randazza said.
Guiffre’s attorney Cassell accused Cernovich of being a professional “slut shamer” who acted as little more than a “proxy” and “cat’s paw” for Dershowitz, whose attorney Andrew Celli disputed that characterization.
Insisting that the men had no relationship, Celli said Dershowitz and Cernovich independently want the record to be open.
“He believes in the marketplace of ideas,” Celli said, referring to his client.
The judges ended the hearing without a ruling, the second major development in the decade-old case in the past month.
In February, a federal judge in Florida ruled that Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement violated the rights of Epstein’s more than 30 underage victim rights under federal law. The judge’s ruling increased the pressure on Labor Secretary Acosta to resign from Trump’s cabinet, where he heads an agency that monitors human trafficking.
https://www.courthousenews.com/panel-si ... -sunlight/
by RocketMan » Tue Mar 12, 2019 7:29 am
A federal court of appeals in New York on Monday took the first step in unsealing documents that could reveal evidence of an international sex trafficking operation allegedly run by multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his former partner, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.
The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit gave the parties until March 19 to establish good cause as to why they should remain sealed and, failing to do so, the summary judgment and supporting documents will be made public. The court reserved a ruling on the balance of the documents in the civil case, including discovery materials.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 12, 2019 2:08 pm
Billionaire Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Funded This ‘Women’s Empowerment’ Entrepreneur
Russian model Lana Pozhidaeva advocates for female entrepreneurs—but tax records show her nonprofit was funded with help from billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Kate Briquelet,
Lachlan Cartwright
03.12.19 4:11 AM ET
A Russian model who advocates for women entrepreneurs funded her nonprofit with help from billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a review of tax records shows.
Lana Pozhidaeva is president of a New York-based charity called Education Advance, which received a majority of its $56,000 in revenues from Epstein in 2017. According to its now-disabled website, Education Advance’s mission is to “support education in the STEM field.”
“Our mission is to increase the diversity of the American education system by providing scholarships to minority students to study STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics). Our purpose is to increase the number of students studying STEM, both at undergraduate and graduate levels,” the website stated.
Pozhidaeva, who was recently profiled on Forbes’ website, as well as Vogue Ukraine and the Italian version of Maxim, declined to answer a list of questions about her charity from The Daily Beast. In an email sent on Saturday, Pozhidaeva said Epstein did make a donation, and $50,000 of it “helped develop an impactful program at MIT.” Pozhidaeva’s boyfriend, with whom she runs the nonprofit, said she didn’t know much about the allegations against Epstein when she took his donation.
Epstein’s attorney Darren Indyke—who also represents Pozhidaeva’s business, WE Talks, in a trademark application—didn’t return emails or voice messages.
Last October, Epstein tried donating to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—only to see his money returned three days later. “Without second thought, the DCCC immediately refunded this unsolicited donation,” one committee spokesperson told The Daily Beast at the time.
A hedge-funder who counted Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew as friends, Epstein has seen his reputation nosedive amid accusations that he sexually assaulted scores of underage girls at his Palm Beach mansion over a period of years, only to receive a slap on the wrist through a secret plea agreement. Epstein faced life in prison for his sex acts with minors, but under a sweetheart deal inked with former U.S. attorney and current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, he spent only 13 months of his 18-month sentence in a county jail. Most of that time was on “work release,” records show.
Epstein is a registered sex offender in New York and Florida. He’s apparently kept a low profile in recent years and in his annual sex offender registrations listed his primary address as Little St. James, his private island in the Virgin Islands.
“Epstein is a registered sex offender in New York and Florida.”
In New York, Epstein is listed as a level 3 offender, a designation given to those who are at a “high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety exists,” according to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services.
In February, a federal judge ruled Acosta violated the law by keeping Epstein’s victims in the dark about the non-prosecution agreement, and the Department of Justice launched an investigation into possible “professional misconduct” by prosecutors.
The bad press surrounding Epstein has also prompted some charities to decline his money. In 2015, Reuters reported that a handful of nonprofits and researchers said they would stop accepting funds from the 66-year-old financier, in light of one accuser’s claims that Epstein forced her to have sex with several men, including Prince Andrew, while she was underage. (The victim has now been identified as Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Prince Andrew has adamantly denied Giuffre’s claims.)
But, according to a review of public records, Epstein has continued to bestow funds on at least one congresswoman in the Virgin Islands, and Pozhidaeva’s nonprofit in New York City.
Education Advance’s latest and only annual tax return reveals Epstein provided $55,000 in funding in 2017. Most of that money, records show, went to a Buddhist organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The group’s total revenues were $56,500 for the tax year beginning Jan. 1, 2017 and ending Dec. 31, 2017. And the only “substantial contributor” listed was “J Epstein Virgin Islands FD Inc” for a total of $55,000, tax records show.
“The only 'substantial contributor' listed was 'J Epstein Virgin Islands FD Inc' for a total of $55,000.”
According to the group’s IRS 990 Form, Education Advance provided $50,000 to Prajnopaya at MIT and listed the religious organization under “Our Partners” on its now-defunct website. In an email to The Daily Beast, the Prajnopaya Institute said it returned Education Advance’s funds.
“We immediately responded by investigating internally,” the email stated. “We discovered that our records do show that Prajnopaya Institute received a one-time contribution of 50K USD from Education Advance in 2017 to support STEM learning related projects. There was no listing of who funded Education Advance. We have returned the contribution.”
Education Advance deleted its website on Monday after The Daily Beast contacted a director of the nonprofit, Pendleton King, who is Pozhidaeva’s boyfriend.
For his part, King told The Daily Beast that Education Advance would return Epstein’s $55,000 donation. He said Pozhidaeva knew very little about the allegations against Epstein when the foundation accepted his donation. “She’s never been involved in anything shady,” King said of Pozhidaeva.
“The money went to something positive,” King added. “Why would you focus on something that’s going to a good cause?”
“The money went to something positive. Why would you focus on something that’s going to a good cause?”
— Pendleton King, a director of Education Advance
While King claimed Pozhidaeva had little contact with Epstein after meeting him at a charity event six or seven years ago, public records show they, at the very least, share the same attorney.
Darren K. Indyke—an attorney for Epstein who in October 2015 represented the billionaire during a deposition of Alan Dershowitz—filed trademark paperwork for Pozhidaeva’s latest project, WE Talks. The company bills itself as a monthly event series for female entrepreneurs and recently hosted a media mixer for media professionals who’ve been laid off, and a competition to win $10,000 from investors.
Documents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show WeWork Companies Inc., which provides work space for startups, is opposing WE Talks’ trademark.
In the trademark filings, Indyke’s Lexington Avenue address is the same as Education Advance’s address listed in IRS documents. That address also matches one for the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation on Epstein’s website.
Meanwhile, in January 2016, Pozhidaeva was photographed by the Daily Mail one Saturday afternoon leaving Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“In January 2016, Pozhidaeva was photographed by the Daily Mail one Saturday afternoon leaving Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.”
Pozhidaeva was represented by MC2 Model Management, which was accused in court papers of supplying minor girls to Epstein. In one January 2015 court filing, Giuffre said she had sex with MC2 owner Jean Luc Brunel multiple times, when she was 16 through 19 years old. “He was another of Epstein’s powerful friends who had many contacts with young girls throughout the world,” Giuffre stated in the declaration.
Soon after, Brunel issued a statement denying Giuffre’s accusations: “I strongly deny having participated, neither directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of. I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager.”
Brunel's name was discovered on message pads Palm Beach cops pulled from trash bins outside Epstein’s home, an attorney for Epstein’s victims, Brad Edwards, said in a 2010 court filing called a “statement of undisputed facts.”
The model kingpin filed a lawsuit against Epstein, claiming his “illegal actions” cost his agency business because of “false links” between the men in press reports.
When registering WE Talks’ web domain in April 2018, Pozhidaeva listed her contact address as an E. 66th Street building in Manhattan where Epstein rents units and was accused of housing underage models. “Jeffrey rents several apartments there where he keeps his girls, alleged models for the MC2 agency,” Edwards told Page Six in 2009.
“Pozhidaeva told 'Vogue' that choosing the right team members is key to launching a business.”
Edwards’ court document said Epstein provided MC2 with “financial support,” and that MC2 employees told Edwards that Epstein’s condos at East 66th Street were used to house young models.
The filing was part of a court battle between Epstein and Edwards, whom Epstein accused of bringing bogus lawsuits by accusers to help his former colleague, convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
Edwards countersued Epstein for malicious prosecution, claiming Epstein was retaliating against him for representing women in lawsuits against the billionaire.
The case was settled just before trial in December. Three of Epstein’s accusers were expected to testify. Epstein, through one of his attorneys, issued a public apology saying his accusations against Edwards were false.
In a profile by Vogue Ukraine last year, Pozhidaeva said she moved to New York seven years ago. Her LinkedIn profile says she studied politics at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, received a master’s degree at the ICN Business School in France, and studied accounting and business management at Harvard’s online business school.
Pozhidaeva told Vogue that choosing the right team members is key to launching a business. “Most startups fall apart precisely because of a wrong or ineffective team,” she said. “It is also quite important to find advisors with extensive experience and a good reputation in the industry. It is better to choose those people who… will be ready to give you time (for example, five hours a month), and not just be a person on your site.”
Two former Education Advance board members contacted by The Daily Beast, Daniel Streeter and Margaret White, said they had no knowledge of the Epstein donation and were no longer associated with Education Advance.
“Lana is a very earnest and very caring person,” White told The Daily Beast.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionai ... ref=scroll
by Cordelia » Wed Mar 13, 2019 10:36 am
by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 14, 2019 4:00 pm
Jeffrey Epstein prosecutor was previously rebuked for handling of a child sex case
Julie K. Brown
Nine months before cutting a covert plea deal with sex trafficking suspect Jeffrey Epstein, Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta was notified that the lead prosecutor in Epstein’s case had concealed victim information in another underage sex crimes case, the Miami Herald has learned.
The prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, was harshly rebuked by a federal judge in January 2007 for what he called her “intentional and/or serious lapse in judgment’’ when she failed to explicitly inform him that the defendant, a Texas man who traveled to Florida to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, had a prior history of predatory behavior with minors, court records show.
Acosta, her boss at the time, not only knew about Villafaña’s breach, but records show that he subsequently defended it. Acosta assigned another prosecutor in his office to write a treatise for the judge in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade him to soften the stinging language in his order.
Senior U.S. District Court Judge William J. Zloch copied Acosta on his order, noting, “The court is at a total loss as to why the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, as well as the Assistant United States Attorney assigned to the above-styled cause, found it appropriate to intentionally withhold ... information from the court.’’
Sp_Marie_Villafana2.jpg
A. Marie Villafaña was the lead federal prosecutor in the Jeffrey Epstein sex case. The U.S. attorney’s office’s handling of the prosecution, which led to a plea to minor charges in state court, has been harshly criticized.
Later that year, Acosta and Villafaña put together a plea bargain for Epstein, a multimillionaire money manager accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls at his mansion in Palm Beach. The deal, a federal judge ruled last month, was intentionally kept from his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
While the two cases are unrelated, it shows that both Acosta and Villafaña had been warned about the importance of victim disclosure in sex crimes cases before the Epstein agreement. They nevertheless forged ahead with a pact with Epstein that violated the law.
U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth A. Marra wrote: “When the Government gives information to victims, it cannot be misleading. While the Government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the [agreement] with Epstein’s attorneys, scant information was shared with victims.’’
This comes as Acosta, who is now the U.S. secretary of labor, is facing mounting scrutiny for his oversight of the Epstein case. On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether President Donald Trump has full confidence in Acosta, noting that Acosta’s involvement in the Epstein case is “currently under review.’’
The Justice Department launched a probe in January into whether Acosta, Villafaña and other prosecutors committed professional misconduct.
Francey Hakes, who worked in the Justice Department’s Crimes Against Children unit, said Zloch’s comments were so brutal that it should have deterred Acosta and Villafaña from keeping the Epstein deal secret.
“It is highly unusual for a court to allege an assistant U.S. attorney has intentionally withheld information. That allegation is like dropping a bomb in the legal community,’’ she said.
AG nominee Barr pledges to look into handling of Epstein case
Sen. Ben Sasse questioned attorney general nominee William Barr about the Jeffrey Epstein case on January 15, 2019, getting the nominee to commit to having the Department of Justice look into the handling of that case if confirmed.
By C-SPAN
“It seems to show that they are not taking these cases very seriously, they are not advocating for strong punishment for sexual predators, and not advocating for victims in a meaningful way.‘’
Villafaña, a well-regarded 18-year veteran federal prosecutor, would not comment for this story. But her lawyer, Jonathan Biran, said she has worked tirelessly on behalf of crime victims. She received the 2011 National Crime Victims’ Rights Service Award as well as the Attorney General’s Project Safe Childhood Award.
He also pointed out that the parents of the victim in the Texas man’s case wrote a letter thanking Villafaña at the conclusion of the case.
“AUSA Villafaña has spent her 18-year career advocating tirelessly on behalf of victims of some of the most serious crimes in Florida, and has received numerous awards for her successful prosecution of major cases,’’ Biran said, adding that Villafaña has “made South Florida a safer place for children and adults alike.’’
Enticing a minor
By all accounts, Adam McDaniel was an awkward and shy Texas teenager who spent countless hours on his computer, socializing with girls on the internet.
In 2005, McDaniel, then 19, traveled from Texas to Fort Lauderdale, where he hopped into a taxi and headed to Boca Raton to meet up with a 14-year-old girl he had been talking to online for about a year. He picked up the ninth-grader at a high school basketball game, and drove her to a Marriott hotel, where they spent the night, court records show.
When she failed to come home that evening, her parents called Boca Raton police. Officers tracked the pair down at the hotel the next day, where they found them in bed, clad in little more than their underwear, according to court records.
McDaniel was arrested on federal sex charges, and pleaded guilty on Oct. 6, 2006, to enticing a minor into sexual conduct by means of interstate commerce, which carried a sentence of from five years up to 30 years in federal prison.
WilliamZloch
U.S. District Judge William Zloch
At sentencing, McDaniel’s public defender, Patrick Hunt, argued for a reduced sentence, blaming his client’s immaturity for the crime. McDaniel had been a good student at Texas Tech and had a family that supported him, Hunt told Zloch.
Family and acquaintances, including a former Fort Worth police lieutenant, submitted letters to the court vouching for McDaniel’s character.
There were other issues, however, presented to the judge. While McDaniel was being held in federal lockup awaiting sentencing, he had corresponded with his victim, despite being ordered not to contact her, the court record shows.
Still, Hunt argued that a sentence of five years was overly harsh.
Villafaña disagreed, but conceded that McDaniel would benefit from psychological treatment. She advocated for a sentence of five to six years, which was at the low end of the guideline.
It was then that the judge heard from the victim’s mother.
In a statement, the mother decried the emotional and mental trauma her daughter suffered and the long road to recovery she had ahead of her. The mother mentioned she was further upset that McDaniel continued contact with her daughter after his arrest and she said she believed that McDaniel was still trying to manipulate her daughter by blaming her for his arrest.
The mother pointed out that prior to their sexual encounter, McDaniel had directed her daughter to watch sexually explicit movies and had described for her sex activities he had had with another underage girl.
At that point, the judge interrupted.
“... There has been some reference to another incident with a minor girl. What do you know about that, if anything?’’ Zloch asked Villafaña.
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Former U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta never told sexual-abuse victims of a lenient plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein.
Getty Images
Only then did Zloch learn that McDaniel had preyed on other girls over the internet, including a 16-year-old California girl whom he brought to Texas and impregnated. He was also having another relationship with a 15-year-old girl at the time of his arrest, Villafaña admitted in court.
The judge promptly sentenced McDaniel to 10 years — twice what Villafaña recommended.
Three months later, in January 2007, after reviewing the entire case, Zloch issued an order excoriating Villafaña for failing to tell him about McDaniel’s prior history.
“The serial nature of defendant’s seduction of minor girls was revealed for the first time to the court upon the Government’s response to the Court’s inquiry,’’ Zloch wrote, explaining that the defendant’s past was evidence of predatory behavior that warranted a harsher sentence because he may pose a danger to the community.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Lourie was assigned to try to correct the record and persuade the judge to strike a portion of his comments. They argued that since McDaniel had never before been charged with a crime, the history was not relevant at sentencing. The defendant’s prior relationship with a 16-year-old was not illegal in Texas or in California, they said, and the girl classified her relationship as a friendship.
All the relevant information was provided to the probation department and at McDaniel’s detention hearing, they added, making the point that it was in the record and, therefore, not intentionally withheld by the government.
While Zloch conceded that the information was part of the probation and bond hearing record, he said it was nevertheless the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s duty to present the defendant’s prior history with minors at sentencing. He refused to strike the most critical portions of his order.
“Lack of candor to the court is a serious charge, and the judge has quite reasonably expressed dismay that the assistant U.S. attorney apparently intended that he never be given a full picture of the defendant’s conduct,’’ Hakes said.
But nine months later, in September 2007, Villafaña was in the throes of thorny negotiations with Epstein’s lawyers. While an FBI investigation was ongoing, Villafaña discussed ways to quietly resolve the case, emails show.
A Miami Herald investigation, “Perversion of Justice,’’ published in November, revealed how federal prosecutors, including Acosta and Villafaña, tried to keep the full scope of Epstein’s crimes out of the public eye. At one point, they discussed charging Epstein in Miami, instead of Palm Beach County, where the crimes happened, noting there would be less media coverage.
How a teen runaway became one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims
Virginia Roberts was working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited to be a masseuse to Palm Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. She was lured into a life of depravity and sexual abuse.
Emails also show that prosecutors repeatedly abided by Epstein’s lawyers’ demands that his victims not be told that an agreement had been reached until after he was sentenced. That meant that the girls could not appear at a hearing to derail finalizing of the deal. Prosecutors had drafted a 53-page federal indictment on sex trafficking charges, but Acosta instead allowed Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. In exchange, Epstein and his co-conspirators were given federal immunity.
Villafaña wrote Epstein lawyer Jay Lefkowitz to discuss the wording of the sentencing agreement for the judge:
“I will include all our standard language regarding resolving all criminal liability and I will mention co-conspirators, but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all the other persons we could charge,’’ Villafaña wrote.
At Epstein’s sentencing, Palm Beach County prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek was questioned by the judge about whether all of Epstein’s victims were told about the deal, as required by law.
“Are there more than one victim?’’ Circuit Court Judge Deborah Dale Pucillo asked Belohlavek at the June 30, 2008, sentencing.
“There’s several,’’ Belohlavek replied.
“Are all the victims in both these cases in agreement with the terms of the plea?’’ the judge asked.
“Yes,’’ Belohlavek said.
Coincidentally, the lawyer representing one of the victims was in the courtroom that day. He told the Herald that neither he, nor his client, was told about the agreement.
Acosta has not responded to the Herald’s repeated requests for comment. A spokesman at the Labor Department told The Washington Post last month: “The office’s decisions were approved by departmental leadership and followed departmental procedures.”
In the past, Acosta has said that he believed the deal was the best chance prosecutors had of ensuring that Epstein spent some time behind bars and was required to register as a sex offender. Epstein served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail — but he was allowed to leave for up to 12 hours a day as part of a work release program not normally offered to convicted sex offenders.
Epstein’s victims, now in their late 20s and 30s, are fighting to have his deal overturned and Epstein sent to prison.
Bradley Edwards, who represents several of Epstein’s victims, defended Villafaña, saying he believed that she was directed to settle the case and not inform Epstein’s victims about the deal.
“In my conversations with her, I came to believe that she was in a difficult position. She never came out and said this, but I suspected that someone above her directed her to do what she did,’’ Edwards said.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politi ... 65309.html
Jeffrey Epstein Abuse Scandal: Trump Labor Secretary Acosta Reportedly Knew Prosecutor Had ‘Serious Lapse in Judgment’ in Past Child Sex Case
By Daniel Moritz-Rabson On 3/14/19 at 4:00 PM EDT
President Donald Trump's Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, knew that the lead prosecutor in a child sex case against politically connected billionaire Jeffrey Epstein had previously withheld relevant information in a suit involving underage sex crimes, The Miami Herald reported on Thursday.
Government prosecutor A. Marie Villafaña had failed to inform a judge that a defendant in a sex crimes case had a "history of predatory behavior with minors," the newspaper reported. A judge rebuked Villafaña for "intentional and/or serious lapse in judgment," in the case, which involved a 19-year-old man traveling from out of state to have sex with a 14-year-old girl.
Months later, in October 2007, Villafaña helped negotiate a plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein, who had been accused of sex crimes with underage victims.
Acosta was serving as the U.S. attorney in Miami—and therefore Villafaña's boss—at the time, and he backed her conduct in the case. The Herald reported that Acosta had a prosecutor write to the judge, trying to convince the court to alter the language of the criticism.
The Department of Labor and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida did not immediately respond when contacted by Newsweek. Villafaña did not respond when contacted on LinkedIn. Her lawyer told the Herald, "AUSA Villafaña has spent her 18-year career advocating tirelessly on behalf of victims of some of the most serious crimes in Florida, and has received numerous awards for her successful prosecution of major cases."
GettyImages-1127369395 Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (left) chats with Texas Governor Greg Abbott during the 2019 White House business session, on February 25. Acosta knew that the lead prosecutor in a child sex case against politically connected billionaire Jeffrey Epstein previously withheld relevant information in a suit involving underage sex crimes, it was reported. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Acosta has faced scrutiny since November, when the Herald published an investigation about the plea deal arranged by government lawyers and Epstein. Epstein, a hedge fund manager, was suspected of bringing underage girls to his estate and then molesting them.
In the nonprosecution agreement arranged by his lawyers, Epstein agreed to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. He served 13 months in country jail, registered as a sex offender and paid restitution to victims identified by the FBI, but was given immunity from federal charges, which could have led to imprisonment for the rest of his life.
The nonprosecution agreement also granted immunity to four other people and "any potential co-conspirators."
Last month, a federal judge ruled that the nonprosecution agreement was illegal.
"Particularly problematic was the government's decision to conceal the existence of the [nonprosecution agreement] and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra wrote in his ruling. "When the government gives information to victims, it cannot be misleading."
The Justice Department also opened an investigation last month into the conduct of government lawyers when arranging the plea deal, according to The New York Times.
https://www.newsweek.com/jeffrey-epstei ... rt-1363566
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 20, 2019 3:33 pm
She was the victim in Jeffrey Epstein’s secret plea deal. She didn’t even know it
Julie K. Brown
The lawyer for the 16-year-old girl who state prosecutors now say was the victim attached to the mysterious plea deal given to multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein says neither he nor his client was ever informed that it was her case that ended Epstein’s prosecution.
The victim, who is now 31, wasn’t among Epstein’s youngest victims, but she was among those who were more brutally sexually assaulted, repeatedly, by both Epstein and others, according to records reviewed by the Miami Herald.
“I was never told that any of my 16 victim clients were part of Epstein’s charges in state court,’’ Robert Josefsberg said. “I can tell you that when the judge asked the prosecutor whether the victims were informed, and she said that they were, that mine were not.’’
The revelation, which comes 11 years after the case was closed, raises more troubling questions about how federal and state prosecutors misled Epstein’s victims, the public and the judge who sentenced him in 2008.
AG nominee Barr pledges to look into handling of Epstein case
Sen. Ben Sasse questioned attorney general nominee William Barr about the Jeffrey Epstein case on January 15, 2019, getting the nominee to commit to having the Department of Justice look into the handling of that case if confirmed.
By C-SPAN
On Monday, the case took another turn when Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Aronberg — who was not in office during Epstein’s case — divulged the birth date of the girl in the decade-old prostitution plea. The new detail was released and reported in response to a query by The Washington Post concerning Epstein’s current sex offender registration.
The choice of victim or victims included in the charging document — and particularly their ages — was significant, and another break for Epstein among a series of many concessions. Had prosecutors chosen someone younger, it could have led to more rigorous monitoring requirements as part of Epstein’s registered sex offender status, the Post reported.
The Herald, which discovered the identities of 80 women who claim they were victims of Epstein, was able to identify the girl through sealed records it obtained as part of its recent investigative series on the case, Perversion of Justice. Only one girl on the police list had that birth date.
Josefsberg said he was disturbed — not only to learn that his client was never told her case was part of Epstein’s plea deal, but that Aronberg’s office would release her full birth date after all this time. (The Miami Herald is not publishing her name or her date of birth to protect her anonymity as a rape victim.)
What’s more, the victim was far from the underage prostitute that federal and state prosecutors tried to paint her as.
In Florida, it is a crime to have sex with anyone under the age of 18, and consent is not a defense. Aronberg did not respond to requests for comment, nor did he respond to a public records request submitted by the Herald for documents or communications about the victim who was part of the deal.
For years, the facts behind the specific charges for which Epstein was sentenced were murky: Records showed he pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges — one a general solicitation charge and the other a single count of procuring someone under the age of 18 for prostitution. But there was no minor victim listed — no age, no circumstances — not even a probable cause affidavit submitted at his sentencing.
Where are they now? The biggest players in the Jeffrey Epstein case
The girls who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein and the cops who championed their cause remain angry over what they regard as a gross injustice, while Epstein's employees and those who engineered his non-prosecution agreement have prospered.
Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Deborah Dale Pucillo, who presided, was given virtually no details about the crimes that Epstein committed — and that was intentional.
At Epstein’s sentencing, the judge asked Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek whether there was more than one victim. “There’s several,’’ Belohlavek replied.
“Are all the victims in both these cases in agreement with the terms of this deal?’’ Pucillo asked. “Yes,’’ Belohlavek said.
But emails and letters show that Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafaña wanted state prosecutors to tell the judge as little as possible, telling Epstein’s lawyers “I would prefer not to highlight for the judge’’ how many victims were involved — which at the time was almost three dozen girls, ages 13 to 17.
Instead of being prosecuted for federal child sex trafficking crimes that could have sent him to prison for life, Epstein was inexplicably given federal immunity under an unusual agreement approved by then-Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta.
As part of the arrangement, Epstein agreed to plead guilty to charges in state court. His victims were never told about the plea deal until well after Epstein was quietly sentenced, serving 13 months in a private wing of the county jail — along with liberal work release privileges and a private valet who drove him to his office every day.
Attorney Brad Edwards reacts after serial sex abuser apologizes and settles malicious prosecution case
Attorney Brad Edwards, middle, reached a civil settlement against Jeffrey Epstein in Palm Beach County Court where Epstein admitted, through a written statement, that the charges he had leveled against Edwards were completely false.
Bruce Green, a professor of legal ethics at Fordham University School of Law, said that if it is found that prosecutors lied to a judge, disciplinary charges can be brought by the Florida Bar.
“The lawyer could be sanctioned, suspended or disbarred. But that assumes the prosecutor deliberately lied to the judge — not that the prosecutor misremembered or didn’t understand the question,’’ he said. “It does seem like the lawyers for Epstein went to a lot of trouble to maintain as much confidentiality surrounding the deal and its resolution, so it could have been deliberately keeping the judge in the dark.’’
Belohlavek, the assistant state prosecutor at Epstein’s sentencing, is now a state prosecutor in Fort Myers. She declined to comment. Villafaña, who is a federal prosecutor in Palm Beach, has also declined to comment.
Acosta, meanwhile — now U.S. secretary of labor — received a vote of support on Tuesday from President Donald Trump, who said he had “complete confidence’’ in him, despite calls from some members of Congress for Acosta’s resignation.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that Acosta and other federal prosecutors involved in the case broke the law by failing to inform Epstein’s victims about the plea, in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was conducting a review of the Epstein case to determine whether there was any prosecutorial misconduct involved in the secret negotiations that led to the pact.
Sex slave to pilot
Josefsberg’s client, who declined to comment for this story, was among a handful of girls who told Palm Beach police that she was pressured to have sex with Epstein and his self-proclaimed sex slave, a young Yugoslavian woman named Nadia Marcinkova.
Marcinkova, who is now an FAA-certified pilot, was also given federal immunity in the plea deal. Josefsberg’s client, labeled Jane Doe 1 for this story, told police what happened to her in a sworn statement in 2005, obtained by the Herald. In it, she said that sometime in 2004, when she was 16, she was approached by another girl, Jane Doe 2, who attended Royal Palm Beach High School in West Palm Beach.
Jane Doe 2 asked the girl whether she wanted to make some money by giving massages to a man named Jeffrey Epstein, who lived in a mansion on Palm Beach island. Jane Doe 1 had heard that a lot of girls at the high school were making money doing these massages, and she agreed to go, the report said.
She was taken there by Jane Doe 2 and introduced to Epstein and his scheduling secretary, Sarah Kellen. (Kellen also was given immunity.) Jane Doe No. 1’s description of what happened matched those of dozens of other girls: She was led up a back stairway to a master bedroom and bath where Epstein appeared in the room, clad only in a towel. She was instructed to strip down to her underwear and begin massaging his back.
Shortly thereafter, he flipped over, dropped his towel and began masturbating while fondling her with a vibrator. She and Jane Doe 2 were each paid $200.
The story behind a Palm Beach sex offender’s remarkable deal
Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, despite sexually abusing dozens of underage girls according to police and prosecutors. His victims have never had a voice, until now.
Jane Doe 1 said she went to Epstein’s house about 15 times, and each time, the encounters became more sexual, and eventually led to full intercourse with Epstein and Marcinkova, according to the statement that Jane Doe 1 told Palm Beach Detective Joe Recarey, who died last year. She also told Recarey that she brought two other girls to Epstein’s house, and was paid $200 for each girl.
She was among three dozen underage girls listed by the U.S. Attorney as victims of Epstein. Sixteen of those victims were represented by Josefsberg, who was designated to assist them in receiving civil restitution from Epstein as part of the plea agreement.
After Jane Doe 1 was interviewed by police, other witnesses, including two of Epstein’s butlers, confirmed that they had seen several of the girls, among them Jane Doe 2, coming and going from Epstein’s house at all hours of the day and night.
Police had corroborating evidence, including phone records and messages with the girls’ names, phone numbers and appointment times.
Green, the Fordham law professor, called the Epstein criminal case “a slam dunk.’’ “How hard was it to prove this case? I would have liked nothing better than to go after this case. Who is going to disbelieve 20 or more girls who tell the same story?’’
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Courtney Wild, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, sued the government in 2008 for failing to inform her of the plea deal he received.
Emily Michot emichot@MiamiHerald.com
Josefsberg said that his clients were “scared to death’’ of Epstein and many have suffered lifelong trauma as a result of the experiences. Many of them did not want to testify. But others did, including Courtney Wild, who sued the government in 2008 for failing to inform her about the plea deal.
That deal is now being revisited with the recent ruling. Wild and other victims are hoping that it is thrown out and Epstein will be prosecuted.
Epstein’s attorneys have not responded to the Herald’s repeated requests for comment. But in a recent letter to The New York Times they insisted that the number of victims involved has been exaggerated and that his plea deal was fair, given a lack of evidence to prove that he committed any federal crimes.
Editor’s note: A federal appeals court in New York is expected to release more sealed documents in a civil case involving Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell, a British socialite, is fighting their release, but the court may make a final decision this week. The Miami Herald filed the motion to have the case unsealed.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politi ... 48659.html
by seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 20, 2019 9:48 pm
Mystery parties seek secrecy in Jeffrey Epstein-related suit
The two said they could face embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, which accused a longtime Epstein friend of engaging in sex trafficking.
By JOSH GERSTEIN
03/20/2019 02:39 PM EDT
Jeffrey Epstein
Last month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that federal prosecutors broke the law a decade ago by failing to consult with and misleading victims of Jeffrey Epstein before making a deal that waived any federal charges in exchange for him pleading guilty to two state felony prostitution charges. | Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images
Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.
Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.
Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.
“Wholesale unsealing of the Summary Judgment Materials will almost certainly disclose unadjudicated allegations against third persons — allegations that may be the product of false statements or, perhaps, simply mistake, confusion, or failing memories of events alleged to have occurred over a decade and half ago,” former federal prosecutor Nick Lewin wrote in an amicus brief filed Tuesday.
Lewin’s brief doesn’t provide any details about his client — identified in the brief by the pseudonym “John Doe” — beyond saying he “potentially” is mentioned in the underlying court filings and opinion. Lewin, who’s based in Manhattan, declined to comment.
“If the identities of non-parties are not adequately protected, the release of the Summary Judgment Materials in this case would likely cause severe and irreparable harm to a wide variety of non-parties, including those implicated in the conduct and those potentially victimized by it,” the brief says.
The other anonymous brief came from Washington-based attorney Kerrie Campbell, who handles gender equality cases and is affiliated with the Time’s Up movement to combat sexual harassment. Campbell requested that the brief submitted on behalf of a “J. Doe” be put under seal, but said in legal papers that the client is “objecting to public disclosure of specific content pertaining to Doe to protect compelling personal privacy interests.”
Campbell did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Giuffre and Maxwell settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum in 2017 after U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet turned down Maxwell’s bid to head off a trial. In the lead-up to that ruling, Sweet accepted almost all filings in the case under seal, without specific orders justifying the secrecy.
Three different parties asked Sweet to unseal records in the case: Harvard law professor and former Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz — a prominent Trump defender — filmmaker and far-right social media personality Mike Cernovich and the Miami Herald.
Dershowitz said he wanted several records released to disprove and discredit allegations two women have made that they had sex with Dershowitz at Epstein’s direction. Dershowitz has categorically denied the allegations.
Cernovich said the far-ranging secrecy in the case undermined efforts to expose sexual trafficking by American elites.
The Miami Herald sought to open all records in the suit as part of a series on Epstein it was preparing and ultimately published last year.
Sweet turned down all the requests, prompting an appeals to the 2nd Circuit. A three-judge panel there heard arguments on the issue earlier this month and indicated last week that it plans to soon release Sweet’s opinion and related filings. The judges asked any parties in the appeals with specific objections to notify the court by Tuesday.
Maxwell indicated in papers filed by her lawyers Tuesday that she continues to oppose any unsealing. Her attorneys said that if the appeals court believes some unsealing is required, the matter should be returned to Sweet for action, since he is most familiar with the case.
Giuffre is supporting immediate unsealing of some materials in the case and a broader unsealing of all records, but said in a filing Tuesday that some personal information should be held back like names of minors, social security numbers, dates of birth and phone numbers.
“The truth is that Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein sexually trafficked [Giuffre] to their well-connected friends, both in this country and elsewhere,” Giuffre attorneys Paul Cassell and Sigrid McCawley wrote. Unfortunately, critical documents and transcripts proving the truth of Ms. Giuffre's allegations remain sealed in the vault of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It is time for the truth to come out.”
Last month, a federal judge in Florida ruled that federal prosecutors broke the law a decade ago by failing to consult with and misleading victims of Epstein before making a deal that waived any federal charges in exchange for him pleading guilty to two state felony prostitution charges. He ultimately served 13 months of a 19-month sentence, much of it working from his office during the day.
The ruling has been a major headache for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who was U.S. Attorney in Miami at the time and approved the plea deal. A Justice Department ethics watchdog has launched an investigation into the episode. Acosta has denied any wrongdoing and has said the deal was a reasonable move by his office in light of the available evidence and other considerations.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/ ... it-1229908
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