Message of the Day: Human Rights
From the penthouse to the jailhouse, Miami Herald, July 8, 2019
We had planned on posting on a different subject today, but events have determined otherwise.
We begin with a salute to investigative journalist Julie K. Brown and the Miami Herald for their commitment to unearthing an extraordinarily critical story and keeping it alive until it exploded across the headlines everywhere today.
It takes a lot to make something the headline story these days (other than the usual politcal toxic brew) on the TV networks and cable news–Anderson Cooper covered it on CNN for a lengthy first segment as one example. It was also headlined in The New York Times and elsewhere in the print and online news. The detonation began over the weekend and continues.
Jeffrey Epstein–an exemplar of the rich and powerful avoiding justice after the height of abuse of power in child sexual abuse–a convicted child sexual predator, who suffered no real consequence when convicted in a plea deal over ten years ago, has now been charged and arrested in New York Saturday for child sexual abuse and trafficking.
There are potentially hundreds of children involved.
Some of Epstein’s running mates have been President Trump, former President Clinton (how do you make that up), Prince Andrew and many others. Whether or not others such as the above are involved is unknown, at least publicly, at this point, although there have been allegations involving some.
Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, was found by a federal judge as having broken the law in allowing Epstein the infamous plea deal in 2008 as the US attorney in Florida at the time.
In our very lengthy July 4, 2017 post, dealing to a large extent with post-2016 election analysis, we covered this story as it had developed at that point, and the incomprehensible silence–except to the extent that avoiding the subject appeared to be the only non-partisan zone, missed or avoided by most of the media as well. Trump was accused in a lawsuit of child sexual abuse, with the accuser saying Epstein abused her as well, with both denying it. The suit was withdrawn days before the election, reportedly because the accuser was too afraid to continue. To the best of our knowledge, the issue was never raised during the campaign by Hillary Clinton. Beyond this, the complications of celebrity, politics, power, money, former enemies realligned, and so on, were not of this world–or perhaps one of the most horrific teachable moments of the underworld of power and corruption of this world.
As we put it at the time:
Impossible to keep up with the hallucinogenic nature of this story. More accused. More inter-connected legal actions. The famous names and their connection to each other, for and against each other historically and currently, are increasingly mind-shattering as you peel the onion on this, as you must to be even a minimally informed citizen.
For a partial primer up to the point of May 4, 2017, see the piece in Politico by Josh Gerstein, “The one weird court case linking Trump, Clinton, and a billionaire pedophile.”
Julie K. Brown and the Miami Herald have been all over the Epstein, et al story for some time, most powerfully in Brown’s multiple award-winning Perversion of Justice investigation.
Her piece in the Herald yesterday, With Jeffrey Epstein locked up, these are nervous times for his friends, enablers, gives an indication of what may be in store to come in the headline alone.
Following, and concluding this post, are today’s lead story in the Miami Herald by Brown (with an excellent accompanying video report from Brown attached, by her partner in the Perversion of Justice investigation, Emily Michot, and also with a link to the investigation), a call to the ramparts against the grotesqueries of power that must all be brought to the reckoning for children to finally get justice in an Editorial by The New York Times, and an Opinion piece, also in the Times, by Michelle Goldberg, that caps it all:
From the penthouse to the jailhouse: Jeffrey Epstein pleads not guilty to sex trafficking
NEW YORK CITY
Jeffrey Edward Epstein appeared in a packed New York federal courtroom Monday in a blue prison jumpsuit and orange sneakers, his white hair disheveled, his face weary and unshaven.
The 66-year-old multimillionaire — who once rubbed elbows with former presidents, royalty and Nobel-Prize-winning scientists — was worlds away from the luxurious protection of his island enclave in the Caribbean, his vast mansion on the Upper East Side, his ranch in New Mexico or his penthouse in Paris.
Epstein, charged Monday in a federal sex trafficking indictment, is in a cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, a fortress that housed — and still houses — some of the most notorious criminal masterminds in U.S. history, including the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and one of the terrorists who engineered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
His appearance marked the first time that two of Epstein’s alleged victims — who were 14 at the time they were sexually abused — were able to face him in a courtroom after a decades-long quest for justice.
Courtney Wild and Michelle Licata, seated in the rear of the courtroom with their attorneys, were stoic as federal magistrate Henry Pitman read Epstein’s indictment and asked him how he intended to plead to the charges.
“Not guilty, your honor,’’ Epstein replied.
Eleven years after receiving federal immunity as part of a strikingly lenient plea agreement, Epstein stands charged with one count of sex trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. If convicted, he could face up to 45 years in prison.
The indictment involves three unidentified underage victims, one in New York and two in Florida — but prosecutors said the case could potentially involve dozens and perhaps hundreds of other women whom investigators suspect Epstein abused as teenagers in both Florida and New York from 2002 to 2006.
At a news conference, Geoffrey S. Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued a public appeal to other victims, asking them to call a special hotline (1-800-CALLFBI) set up as part of what authorities called the office’s “Number one case.’’
“While the charged conduct is from a number of years ago, the victims — then children and now young women — are no less entitled to their day in court. My office is proud to stand up for these victims by bringing this indictment,’’ Berman said, adding that Epstein’s conduct “shocked the conscience’’ of America.
Berman’s statement was widely seen as a harsh rebuke to Florida prosecutors who cut an extraordinary non-prosecution agreement with Epstein in 2008. As part of the deal, federal prosecutors — led by then Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta — disposed of the case without his victims’ knowledge, depriving them of the ability to appear in court and possibly derail the agreement.
Acosta’s handling of the case, detailed in “Perversion of Justice,” a Miami Herald investigation that was published last November, has come under harsh criticism.
The fact that the charges were brought by the Southern District’s public corruption unit raised the spectre that the investigation could veer into whether state and federal prosecutors who helped negotiate the deal committed any wrongdoing, beyond failing to notify the victims that they had secretly given Epstein a plea bargain.
“In order for the public corruption unit to be involved in this, there is more here than just a millionaire sex predator. I anticipate other superseding indictments,’’ said James A. Gagliano, a retired supervisory special agent with the FBI.
“For the public corruption unit to be involved, it would have to be looking at someone in a position of public trust, that is what the public corruption unit seeks to do.’’
In court Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Rossmiller said that Epstein should be held without bail until trial, citing his enormous wealth, his ability to travel by on his own private jet, the seriousness of his crimes, the length of sentence he could face and a history of alleged tampering with witnesses.
“He is a man of nearly infinite means,’’ Rossmiller said.
The prosecutor also disputed Epstein’s lawyers’ contention that their client was leading a “law-abiding life of success, generosity and creativity,’’ by pointing out that a search warrant executed at Epstein’s New York mansion on Saturday uncovered a trove of lewd photographs that appear to be of underage girls. They also seized from a locked safe discs labeled “young misc. nudes,’’ Rossmiller added.
“This is not an individual who has left his past behind,’’ he said.
However Epstein’s lead attorney, Reid Weingarten, used the 2006-2008 state and federal investigation to boost his argument that there was insufficient evidence against Epstein to charge him with sex trafficking a decade ago — and that the current indictment is just as weak.
“There was a significant portion of the law enforcement community who thought he was guilty of a misdemeanor,’’ Weingarten said.
The 2008 plea deal represented “a global solution’’ that precludes New York prosecutors from revisiting the case, he said.
“To us, this indictment is a do-over, it’s old stuff, it’s ancient stuff,’’ Weingarten said.
Weingarten asked for a continuance of the bail hearing so that the defense team, which includes noted criminal attorney Martin Weinberg, could put together “a bail package’’ that would involve travel restrictions and other guarantees that Epstein wouldn’t flee.
Weingarten emphasized that if Epstein had wanted to run, he could have done so by now since there is another case pending involving his plea deal that was brought by victims in South Florida. In that case, filed 10 years ago by two of Epstein’s victims, a federal judge in February ruled that the so-called global agreement was illegal because it was executed in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
Monday’s New York indictment mirrors the case that Palm Beach police put together against Epstein in 2006 and 2007. According to the police, Epstein employed recruiters to lure middle school and high school girls as young as 13 to his Palm Beach mansion to give him massages that turned into sex acts. The girls were paid $200-$300 and could earn additional money if they recruited other girls, which they did, from malls and teenage parties around West Palm Beach.
Then-Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer wanted to charge Epstein only with a misdemeanor, but Palm Beach police referred the case to the FBI, believing that Epstein’s crimes were more serious.
Although federal prosecutors had gathered enough evidence to fill a 53-page federal indictment on sex trafficking charges, Acosta elected to sign off on a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators (some of whom have never been identified) immunity from federal charges.
Epstein’s arrest on Saturday came eight months after the Miami Herald published a re-examination of the 2008 deal, revealing that Acosta, now President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, met secretly with one of Epstein’s lawyers, Jay Lefkowitz, in October of 2007, at a West Palm Beach Marriott, 70 miles from Acosta’s Miami office.
As part of the deal at that time, Epstein pleaded guilty to minor state prostitution charges involving a 17-year-old girl. He served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail but was allowed to leave the facility nearly every day to spend 10 or more hours in his office in downtown West Palm Beach.
Acosta, Lefkowitz and Epstein lawyer Kenneth Starr — the independent counsel who pursued President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair — were all alums of the same prominent Washington law firm, Kirkland & Ellis.
Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, also worked for the Kirkland firm. CNN reported Monday that he recused himself from the Epstein case because of those ties.
The story behind the Miami Herald’s investigation
The Jeffrey Epstein case also has gained notoriety in part because of Epstein’s wide circle of rich and influential friends, including Donald Trump, former President Clinton and Prince Andrew.
The Miami Herald’s coverage of Epstein has brought a rising chorus of calls for Acosta to resign or be fired from the president’s Cabinet.
Three days before Epstein’s arrest, a federal appeals court in New York ordered the unsealing of up to 2,000 pages of documents that are expected to show evidence relating to whether Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, were recruiting underage girls and young women as part of an international sex trafficking operation. Maxwell, 57, has never been charged.
. . .
Who Protected Jeffrey Epstein?
The Editorial Board, July 8, 2019, The New York Times
Mr. Epstein is not the only one due a reckoning with justice.
On Monday, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed a 14-page indictment against Jeffrey Epstein, charging the wealthy financier with operating and conspiring to operate a sex trafficking ring of girls out of his luxe homes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Palm Beach, Fla., “among other locations.”
Even in the relatively sterile language of the legal system, the accusations against Mr. Epstein are nauseating. From “at least in or about” 2002 through 2005, the defendant “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls,” some as young as 14 and many “particularly vulnerable to exploitation.” The girls were “enticed and recruited” to visit Mr. Epstein’s various homes “to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars.” To “maintain and increase his supply of victims,” he paid some of the girls “to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused,” thus creating “a vast network of underage victims.”
If convicted, Mr. Epstein faces up to 45 years in prison. This seems a reasonable, if belated, punishment for the rampant abuse of girls of which Mr. Epstein stands credibly accused.
But Mr. Epstein is not the only one for whom a reckoning is long overdue.
The allegations in the New York indictment are a depressing echo of those that Mr. Epstein faced in Florida more than a decade ago, when his perversion first came to light. In 2008, federal prosecutors for the Southern District of Florida, at the time led by Alexander Acosta, who is now the nation’s secretary of labor, helped arrange a plea deal for Mr. Epstein that bent justice beyond its breaking point.
In exchange for pleading guilty to two state counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor, Mr. Epstein avoided a federal indictment that could have put him in prison for life. Instead, he served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach county jail, where liberal work-release privileges allowed him to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week in his private office. Mr. Epstein paid restitution to some of his victims and was required to register as a sex offender — a designation that he later tried to have downgraded in New York to a less restrictive level.