How Jeffrey Epstein Got A Sweetheart Deal In Sex Abuse Case
With unlimited funds, a top-tier legal team and a circle of powerful friends, a Palm Beach multimillionaire financier was able to get off nearly scot free after being accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls, the Miami Herald reported.
The Herald’s first story in a three-part series on hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein revealed that in 2007, Alexander Acosta, then U.S. attorney in Miami and now President Trump’s secretary of labor, helped Epstein escape a lifetime in prison after the financier allegedly created what the Herald described as a “large, cult-like network of underage girls.”
Assisted by female “recruiters,” Epstein was accused of making these young girls perform sex acts behind his waterfront mansion and on his plane, sometimes as often as three times a day. Police began investigating in 2005.
“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,’’ retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter told the Herald.
But Epstein, 54, only ended up serving 13 months in the county jail on two prostitution charges. Epstein, a friend of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and represented by high-powered lawyers like Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz, reached an plea deal with Acosta that would shut down the ongoing FBI investigation. The agreement was kept hidden from the victims, which appeared to break federal law. It also granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators,” the existence or identities of whom remain unclear.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO