Jeffrey Epstein’s Indictment: Perversion Enabled by Privilege
Don’t led the lurid headlines distract you. Former hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein’s Saturday arrest on charges of sex offenses involving underage girls in New York and Florida is a tiny opening into the sordid world of the ultra wealthy.
Thanks to the persistence of Epstein’s victims and Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown, the public now has the opportunity to learn how wealth enables injustice in today’s world.
Brown’s reporting included on-the-record, firsthand accounts from four victims and exposed a secret plea deal negotiated with former prosecutor and current Department of Labor secretary Alexander Acosta.
Much will be made about the “sex” part of the story. The money and privilege aspects of this unfolding scandal should not be overlooked. Today, I’ll focus on those threads, as well as the nearly two decades of cover ups in this case.
I have no doubt the more than eighty (80!) victims, mostly underage women struggling to survive, will get paraded and berated as their stories come to light. The way survivors are used and abused in the system serves all-too-often as a distraction from the larger issues.
As author Summer Brennan noted once the arrest became public knowledge:
I’ve followed this story and individual for a long time. It needs to be understood that this is about much more than the actions of individual men, but a *system* of powerful men using underage girls as luxury goods to offer, trade, etc. There is a world in which this is the norm. A class of (mostly) uber-powerful men who think the rules do not apply to them. One of them is in the White House.
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Via the Huffington Post:
According To The Bail Memo:
Prosecutors consider Epstein to be a very high flight risk, given his enormous wealth, private planes and international ties.
Epstein owns six residences, including a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands that was listed as his primary residence. He also has 15 motor vehicles and access to two private planes.
Authorities who searched Epstein’s residences found a huge amount of corroborating evidence, including contact information for victims, notes, phone records and more.
Among the evidence authorities uncovered was an enormous trove of explicit photographs of young women and girls, which he maintained even after his initial conviction in 2008.
Epstein engaged in “witness tampering, harassment [and] other obstructive behaviors,” according to Berman. The billionaire allegedly went to extreme degrees to obstruct the investigation, including by having his private investigator run someone off the road.
Much of the reporting on Epstein’s arrest claims he is a billionaire. That’s a questionable claim, investigated and disputed by Forbes a decade ago.
“The source of his wealth—a money management firm in the U.S. Virgin Islands—generates no public records, nor has his client list ever been released.”
As we’ll see throughout this report, it’s not the money (Epstein is wealthy) as much as it is the access to the one per centers and their minions that makes a pedophile lifestyle possible.
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Jeffrey Epstein was a two time college dropout nearly five decades ago when he was hired by headmaster Donald Barr as a teacher at New York City’s exclusive Dalton School.
Donald Barr just happens to be father to one William Barr, currently ensconced as Attorney General of the United States.
One of Epstein’s students was the son of “Ace” Greenberg, chairman of Bear Stearns. After two years at the school, Epstein started work as an options trader at Bear Stearns, where he worked in the special products division, advising high-net-worth clients on tax strategies (Ace was also Donald Trump’s stockbroker at the time.)
The former high school teacher was soon elevated to partner at the firm. He left to start his own firm in 1982 after cooperating with prosecutors in an investigation and received “valuable consideration” for providing investigators with unspecified information.
According to an interview in Vanity Fair, Epstein’s primary (and only known) client was Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner. (Limited Brands owns Victoria’s Secret, PINK, and Bath & Body Works).
Back to Summer Brennan:
In the early 2000s, Epstein made a point of befriending prominent or upcoming scientists, journalists, famous actors, and politicians, most of whom were likely never shown this side of things, especially if they were women. Young women who *were* shown this secret world of exploitative male power, often victimized themselves, were given the impression that this was just the way things were and they had no power to change it. But it shouldn’t be that way
A Daily Beast account published over the weekend, says Vicky Ward, who wrote a 2003 profile about Epstein for Vanity Fair, originally included a highly credible allegation about Epstein molesting a 16-year-old girl. She says it was cut from the published version by then-editor Graydon Carter.
When I put their allegations to Epstein, he denied them and went into overdrive. He called Graydon. He also repeatedly phoned me. He said, “Just the mention of a 16-year-old girl… carries the wrong impression. I don’t see what it adds to the piece. And that makes me unhappy.”
Next, Epstein attacked both me and my sources. Letters purporting to be from the women were sent to Graydon, which the women claimed (and gave evidence to show me) were fabricated fakes. I had my own notes to disprove Epstein’s claims against me.
And then there was Epstein himself, who, I’d be told after I’d given birth, got past security at Condé Nast and went into the Vanity Fair offices. By now everyone at the magazine was completely spooked.
The Palm Beach Police Department initiated an investigation into Epstein on March 15, 2005. Investigators, who interviewed five victims and 17 witnesses, sought to charge Epstein, and two assistants with crimes tied to his alleged sexual behavior with underage girls.
From Vox:
When authorities began investigating Epstein, he assembled a team of private investigators to dig up dirt on the girls who accused him and the police and prosecutors working the case. Then he and his team of powerful lawyers — including Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr — were able to convince prosecutors to go easy on him despite disturbing allegations by a growing number of women and girls.
Epstein was proud of his “collection” of famous friends, which included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and there’s long been speculation that some of these friends may have participated in his abuses. But because he has been able to avoid harsh punishment and minimize publicity around the details of his case, he’s also been able to keep details about anyone else who may have been involved out of the public eye.
The fact that Epstein avoided serious punishment for so long is a reminder that the American justice system has long been all too willing to ignore the words of girls and women, especially when they accuse a wealthy and influential man.
He was indicted in 2007, but thanks to a deal brokered by Alexander Acosta, then the US Attorney for Miami and now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Epstein was sentenced under Florida law to 18 months and was required to register as a sex offender. But he served only 13 months and was permitted daily furloughs to go to his office.
The Miami Herald’s investigation revealed that Acosta held an unusual one-on-one meeting with Epstein’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, in October 2007, at a West Palm Beach Marriott. Records showed that it was at that meeting that Acosta acceded to a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and others involved in his operation federal immunity.
The non-prosecution agreement with Epstein also shut down an FBI investigation, along with immunizing any unnamed co-conspirators. This was a most unusual thing to be included in such a negotiation.
In a loophole that has led to his current round of legal troubles, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida deferred federal charges in favor of prosecution by the State of Florida. This means Epstein crimes outside of those enumerated in Florida were still subject to prosecution.
Epstein was required to register in the State of New York as a sex offender. For reasons that remain unknown (but are certainly obvious) a Manhattan prosecutor inexplicably argued for leniency during the 2011 hearing.
Documents acquired by the New York Post following a suitsuit seeking to get files unsealed revealed the then-deputy chief of Sex Crimes, Jennifer Gaffney, had been given a confidential state assessment that deemed Epstein to be highly dangerous and likely to keep preying on young girls.
It describes a state assessment’s findings that Epstein should be monitored in New York as a level three offender — reserved for the most dangerous.
In making its assessment, the NY state Board of Examiners of Sex Offenders evaluated the sworn, corroborated accounts of numerous young girls who had been lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., compound in 2005 and 2006.
Girls aged 14 to 17 years old were recruited and paid $200 to $1,000 to give Epstein erotic massages that included sexual contact, intercourse and rape, Palm Beach cops found.
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During his confirmation hearings now Attorney General Barr testified that he might have to recuse himself from any future involvement in the Epstein case because his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, was part of the Florida plea deal. Small world, huh?
Epstein's Saturday arrest capped months of investigation by federal agents and prosecutors with the Southern District of New York’s Public Corruption Unit, assisted by investigators with the sex trafficking division.
Court documents unsealed today show Epstein is charged with creating and maintaining a network that allowed him to sexually exploit and abuse dozens of underage girls, as young as 14 at the time.
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1148029199145480192
This weekend’s charges come just days after a Manhattan-based federal appeals panel ordered documents unsealed in a defamation case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an Epstein accuser, against Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell, his former girlfiend turned partner in sex-trafficking, is the daughter of the late Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born UK press baron. She allegedly was in charge of procuring girls for Epstein and others to engage in sexual activity.
From Washington Monthly:
Lawyers for Epstein’s victims, in court filings, have often likened Epstein’s sex operation to an organized crime family, with Epstein and Maxwell at the top, and below them, others who worked as schedulers, recruiters, pilots and bookkeepers.
For her part, Maxwell, whose social circle included such friends as Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of the British Royal family, has been described as using recruiters positioned throughout the world to lure women by promising them modeling assignments, educational opportunities and fashion careers. The pitch was really a ruse to groom them into sex trafficking, it is alleged in court records.
At least one woman, Sarah Ransome, claimed in a lawsuit that Maxwell and Epstein threatened to physically harm her or destroy any chance she would have of a fashion career if she didn’t have sex with them and others.
Maxwell has denied the claim and has never been charged.
His political connections over the years included President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton, whose flights to Africa (on a plane later dubbed ‘the Lolita express’) with the then-stockbroker were the source of the media’s initial interest in Epstein.
Trump spoke of Epstein in a 2002 interview with New York Magazine saying, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy, adding, "He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
In May of 2016, a woman named Katie Johnson filed a $100 million lawsuit accusing Trump of sexually assaulting her at an Epstein party in Manhattan. Johnson dropped the suit later in the year, with her lawyer claiming she was afraid to pursue the case due to threats.
Epstein’s personal phone book became public, after a former butler Alfredo Rodriguez tried to sell it and got busted for not telling prosecutors about its existence.
Donald Trump, Courtney Love, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and uber-lawyer Alan Dershowitz may have been identified by a butler as potential "material witnesses" to pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's crimes against young girls, according to a copy of Epstein's little black book obtained by Gawker.
An annotated copy of the address book, which also contains entries for Alec Baldwin, Ralph Fiennes, Griffin Dunne, New York Post gossip Richard Johnson, Ted Kennedy, David Koch, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, and all manner of other people you might expect a billionaire to know, turned up in court proceedings after Epstein's former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez tried to sell it in 2009. About 50 of the entries, including those of many of Epstein's suspected victims and accomplices as well as Trump, Love, Barak, Dershowitz, and others, were circled by Rodriguez.
According to an FBI affidavit, Rodriguez described the address book and the information contained within it as the "Holy Grail" or "Golden Nugget" to unraveling Epstein's sprawling child-sex network…
...In addition to the names above, as well as scores of apparent underage victims in Florida, New Mexico, California, Paris, and the United Kingdom listed under the rubric of "massage," the circled entries include:
Billionaire Leslie Wexner, Former New Mexico Governor Bruce King, Former New Mexico Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson, Peter Soros, the nephew of George Soros, Former Miss Sweden and socialite New York City doctor Eva Andersson Dubin.
Some of the circled entries include additional notes—one address in New York City, for instance, is marked as an "apt. for models," and two names bear the marking "witness."
https://twitter.com/funder/status/1068143919479824390
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https://twitter.com/Pappiness/status/1147842506786127873
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