What’s in it for me? Learn the frightening details of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal operation and how he escaped justice for so long.
The name Jeffrey Epstein has become synonymous with sex trafficking and the horrible abuse of underage girls.
But that doesn’t mean the full story behind Epstein’s operation is well known.
Many questions still persist, but the facts that are known paint a disturbing picture of how Epstein accrued a fortune and a stable of accomplices that allowed him to transport, trap, and abuse an untold number of vulnerable teenage girls.
This isn’t a story for the faint of heart, but it is an important one, especially in light of how the US justice system allowed Epstein to continue his operation long after the ugly details came to light.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how Epstein’s initial criminal case was mishandled by prosecutors; how Brown’s reporting helped shine a light on an ongoing injustice; and how many millions of dollars Epstein’s estate has paid out in compensation to survivors.
In looking for a new angle on the Epstein case, Brown quickly saw how big it was.
It was in 2016 when author and Miami Herald reporter Julie K.
Brown began to dig into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
By that time, it had already been eight years since a criminal case in Florida had resulted in Epstein pleading guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution and agreeing to be registered as a sex offender.
He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, though he didn’t spend much time behind bars.
The plea deal that the state prosecutors struck with Epstein and his vast team of lawyers had always seemed questionable to Brown.
And in 2016, the case was once again gaining attention in a number of different ways.
The key message here is: In looking for a new angle on the Epstein case, Brown quickly saw how big it was.
One of the things that sparked new interest in the Epstein case was several women coming forward to accuse the presidential nominee, Donald Trump, of inappropriate sexual contact.
One had filed a lawsuit that stated she’d been raped by both Trump and Epstein when she was only 13 years old.
At the same time, a cursory look showed that since the 2008 criminal case had closed, around 30 civil lawsuits had been filed by women with similar stories of being entrapped by Epstein and forced to perform sexual acts.
Still, this was all old news.
None of it added up into the kind of investigative report that Brown was hoping her editor would sign off on.
But then, after Trump won the election, another enticing angle emerged.
The 2008 plea deal had largely been arranged by Alexander Acosta, who was US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
And in April 2017, Trump chose Acosta to become the new US Secretary of Labor.
Acosta’s involvement in the plea deal wasn’t getting much attention from the press, and this fresh angle was enough for Brown’s editor to agree to a deeper look into what had happened.
This investigation revealed a shocking level of injustice.
While the plea deal was based around one or two cases of what was called underage prostitution, police and prosecutors knew of literally dozens of victims.
And it wasn’t hard to see that these women were likely only the tip of the iceberg.
From the start, what Brown really wanted to do was to tell the stories of Epstein’s victims.
This was something that other reporters had failed to do.
But of course, it wasn’t going to be easy.
Epstein had a mysterious rise to wealth and privilege.
Many of the women who came forward against Epstein didn’t want their names to be part of the public record.
They were listed as Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2, and so on.
There was also the fact that many of the women who came forward in 2008 were now, understandably, looking to move on with their lives.
So it would take a lot of time and effort for Brown to talk to lawyers and track down women willing to speak to her.
In the meantime, she’d learn more about the mysterious financier with an unusual past.
The key message here is: Epstein had a mysterious rise to wealth and privilege.
Epstein was born in Brooklyn on January 20, 1953.
He was clearly a smart child.
He often helped his studio somaclassmates with their homework, and skipped both the third grade and the seventh grade, eventually graduating from high school at the age of 16.
Some who knew him at the time considered him a prodigy at both math and the piano.
From here, things get somewhat murkier.
After a few years attending New York University but not graduating, in 1974, Epstein was hired as a math teacher at the Dalton School, a distinguished New York prep school.
A few unusual facts surround Epstein’s hiring.
Firstly, the headmaster who offered him the job was Donald Barr, the father of William Barr, who’d later act as US attorney general under Trump.
Oddly enough, in 1973, Donald Barr had also published a book entitled Space Relations, in which prosperous aliens kidnap and force humans to be sex slaves.
Barr mysteriously left the school not long after hiring Epstein, and the interim headmaster reported that some female students felt uncomfortable around their new math teacher.
But by 1976 Epstein had moved on to work at the popular brokerage firm Bear Stearns.
How a man with no college degree or experience becomes first a prep-school teacher and then a self-described “financial strategist” to billionaires is still an open question.
But within a few years, Epstein was being profiled in magazines and claiming he only took on clients with at least nine zeros in their yearly earnings report.
In July 1980, Cosmopolitan magazine crowned him a “Bachelor of the Month.
In the late 80s, Epstein began to amass an untold fortune by working as a sort of financial fixer and advisor for some of the world’s wealthiest people.
Police files and court records revealed a disturbing pattern of abuse.
During that time, he began buying properties for himself in places like New York City, Paris, and Palm Beach, Florida.
He even bought an island in the US Virgin Islands and built an imposing compound on it.
When he wasn’t traveling, though, he was often in his mansion in Palm Beach.
And it was the Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, and detective Joe Recarey, who conducted one of the most compelling police investigations against Epstein.
It all started in 2005 when a 14-year-old girl had been lured to Epstein’s mansion.
The key message here is: Police files and court records revealed a disturbing pattern of abuse.
Nearly ten years after the 2008 plea deal, Reiter and Recarey were still upset.
So much so that they were hesitant to be interviewed for Brown’s investigation.
In the end, however, they recognized her commitment and helped navigate her through the mountains of reports and civil case filings, an arduous and time-consuming task that had caused other reporters to turn away from the story.
But Brown packed the boxes into the spare bedroom of her small home and got to work.
The files and statements from the dozens of victims showed a disturbingly consistent operation.
Epstein, along with his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, preyed upon underage girls who needed money, luring them to his Palm Beach mansion with the promise of hundreds of dollars to provide a massage – or just hang out with a rich older man who had money to burn.
When they arrived, the girls were asked to leave their names and phone numbers at the door, instantly making them part of Epstein’s database.
The accounts were consistent: They were escorted to a room where a massage table and a neon-colored couch awaited.
The girls were told that Epstein would come in and they’d give him a massage and then be paid two or three hundred dollars.
Often the money was already sitting there.
Then Epstein would come in, wearing a towel around his waist.
He’d lie on the table and the girls would start to massage his back and legs.
Epstein would invariably remove the towel, exposing himself, and then tell the girls to undress down to their underwear.
He’d begin to fondle them and masturbate while telling them how pretty they were.
Upon completion, Epstein would tell the girls how appreciated they were, how much he’d like to see them again, and how they could continue to make even more money.
After Epstein’s arrest, things took a turn with the state prosecutors.
Epstein and Maxwell knew how to target vulnerable girls, and Florida was full of families struggling to get by.
With the promise of making more money, some girls returned to Epstein’s house only to find that he was intent on quickly escalating to rape.
Sometimes he’d force himself on the girls.
Other times he’d tell them to have sex with Maxwell, or with other people who were visiting or attending his parties.
Usually, the girls who were lured to Epstein’s mansion were also told they could recruit other underage girls.
Since this was a way for them to make money without interacting with Epstein, it often worked, like a degrading Ponzi scheme.
One girl claimed she’d brought at least 25 others to Epstein, and she wasn’t the only one to do so.
The key message here is: After Epstein’s arrest, things took a turn with the state prosecutors.
Finally, in 2005, one of Epstein’s victims contacted the Palm Beach police, which launched a lengthy undercover investigation, complete with round-the-clock surveillance.
In the months that followed, the police spoke with dozens more girls who told similar stories of being lured by cash and then abused.
Some were jetted to far-off places aboard Epstein’s private jets.
Some had their passports and phone taken while they were stuck on his compound on the Virgin Islands.
Many of them were threatened by Epstein and his accomplices, and then by his lawyers.
Epstein knew early on that he was being investigated.
And when it came time for the arrest warrant to be issued, Epstein knew the raid on his Palm Beach mansion was coming.
It was well known that Epstein had cameras and computers throughout his mansion, but when Palm Beach police officers arrived, all they found were dangling cables.
Epstein wasn’t just a financial investor.
He also invested in politicians on both sides of the aisle – anyone who might end up being of use.
He was particularly a big donor to Palm Beach politicians.
As the case against Epstein moved forward, the question would be: Just how influential was his money?
Despite the abundance of evidence, the case kept receiving resistance from higher-ups in the state prosecutor’s office.
Rather than working to present as strong a case as possible, as assistant prosecutor Ann Marie Villafaña at one time was hoping to do, there were constant negotiations with Epstein’s lawyers on how to reach a plea deal that was acceptable to the defendant.
The details of the plea bargain raise many questions about justice and fairness.
As negotiations between Epstein’s lawyers and the state prosecutor’s office continued, it became clear that many of the victims were being sidelined, which isn’t uncommon in such cases.
Prosecutors debated the reliability of witnesses who’d likely be characterized as prostitutes by the defense.
Some had turned to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of what had happened to them, which may have caused the prosecution team to find these young women even less reliable.
But that wasn’t the only reason.
As negotiations continued, the police were finding more evidence and more victims, yet the prosecutors kept turning them away.
Reiter and Recarey were dumbfounded.
Clearly, something else was going on.
In fact, it was beginning to look like the state was going to torpedo its own case.
The key message here is: The details of the plea bargain raise many questions about justice and fairness.
There are a number of controversial aspects to Epstein’s plea deal.
First there’s the way it was reached.
Rather than simply bring charges against Epstein, a grand jury was hastily announced, giving no time for the witnesses to prepare.
In fact, the prosecutors were only planning on calling on one victim to testify.
The evidence was overwhelming, there were dozens of girls, and here they were purposefully weakening it.
This was when Recarey knew the main prosecutor, Barry Krischer, was trying to bury the case.
Then, on October 12, 2007, with negotiations still being bitterly fought on both sides, US district attorney Alexander Acosta met with one of Epstein’s high-priced lawyers, Jay Lefkowitz.
A letter from Lefkowitz details the agreement made during that meeting, and that it entailed a promise that the victims in the case wouldn’t be notified of the pending plea deal.
This is troubling for a number of reasons, but from a legal standpoint, it’s an issue because the Crime Victims’ Rights Act specifically requires that victims have a right to be notified and allowed to testify in court, even if there’s a plea deal being arranged.
Of course, Epstein and his lawyers didn’t want dozens of women testifying in court, even if the prosecutors agreed to a lenient sentence.
And a lenient sentence is just what he got.
On June 30, 2008, Epstein was given an 18 month prison sentence for pleading guilty to two felony prostitution charges; he was also required to register as a sex offender.
But even these conditions would prove negotiable.
After the plea deal, Epstein strove to maintain his lifestyle.
For all intents and purposes, Epstein was supposed to be behind bars at a state prison.
But in reality, the door to his cell at the much more comfortable Palm Beach County jail was purposefully left unlocked.
At first, Epstein had access to the attorney’s office in the jail, where he could watch TV.
But then he was given permission to work from his office six days a week, from 10:00 a.
m.
to 10:00 p.
m.
, as long as he was supervised by sheriff’s deputies.
Epstein paid the sheriff’s office all of $128,000 for this privilege, as well as additional overtime fees for the deputies.
The key message here is: After the plea deal, Epstein strove to maintain his lifestyle.
Epstein was even dropped off at his Palm Beach mansion from time to time.
When Brown later tried to request more information about this – such as any logbooks kept by the deputies or emails concerning Epstein’s time in custody, it only led to a lot of dead ends.
The original logbooks no longer exist, according to the sheriff's office, and everything else was heavily redacted to the point of being indecipherable.
When she was able to ask one deputy about efforts to make sure Epstein wasn’t “doing anything wrong” while he was in his office or in his mansion, he replied, “That wasn’t my job.
” Later, another young woman would testify that she was coerced into having sex with Epstein while he was out on work release, with the sheriff’s deputies stationed right outside his office doors.
At the time, the privileges Epstein received during his 13 months in prison flew under the radar.
There was no public outcry.
Upon his release in June 2009, Epstein went to work trying to paint a new image of himself as a freewheeling philanthropist.
He established the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, as well as a fellowship at the International Peace Institute, and an online educational series called NeuroTV.
He pledged to build a school in Haiti, fund charter schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, and fund scientific research on music therapy for premature babies.
There’s very little evidence that any of these promises bore fruit.
But Epstein always enjoyed being considered part of the scientific and philanthropic community.
He nurtured relationships with people like Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, and he prided himself on flying Bill Clinton around Africa in his private jet.
Most everyone tried to distance themselves from Epstein after 2008, but he was adamant about trying to keep his status in place.
Brown’s report reignited interest in the Epstein case,and spurred the FBI back into action.
Through diligence and resourcefulness, Brown did manage to track down and meet personally with some of the women Epstein had abused over the years.
As part of her piece for the Miami Herald, she wanted to create a documentary that allowed people to hear from the victims themselves – the very thing that the Epstein plea deal denied them.
This video would accompany an article entitled “Perversion of Justice,” which detailed the ways in which the 2008 criminal case was mishandled.
The article and the video went online on November 28, 2018.
By the following day, the story had caught fire across social media and was getting picked up by news outlets around the world.
Brown had been hoping it would make a difference, but she wasn’t exactly prepared for what followed.
The key message here is: Brown’s report reignited interest in the Epstein case and spurred the FBI back into action.
People who went up against Epstein faced a common experience of harassment.
That meant phone calls from threatening lawyers, stalking by private investigators, mysterious phone calls at all hours of the night, and hired goons rifling through your trash cans looking for something to use against you.
It was scary at times, but in 2018, Epstein’s tactics weren’t going to work.
Brown’s report landed right in the middle of the #MeToo movement, which was changing the way cases dealing with sexual abuse and mistreatment were handled.
In this atmosphere, more women were stepping forward, like Virginia Giuffre, who stated that when she was 17 she was sexually trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell and forced into sexual acts with Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew, of the British royal family.
Both the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York opened cases against Epstein.
As new investigations were opening up, large sums of money began to be transferred from Epstein to his conspirators, including Sarah Kellen, who was allegedly in charge of organizing Epstein’s sex schedule, and Lesley Groff, who managed his New York office.
Prosecutors see these payments of between $100,000 and $250,000 as hush money, a reminder to keep quiet when people start asking questions.
They made little difference, though.
The FBI arrested Epstein as his private jet returned from Europe and landed in New Jersey on July 6, 2019.
The charges were one count of sex trafficking of minors, and another for conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
Plus, the court made it clear that more charges could be forthcoming.
Not long after Epstein’s arrest.
Upon Epstein’s second arrest, a series of strange events unfolded.
Acosta resigned as the Trump administration’s Secretary of Labor.
At first, he tried to explain away the plea deal and the violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act, but the excuses were misleading at best and the press weren’t letting up.
Trump accepted his resignation just before Epstein’s bail hearing.
The key message here is: Upon Epstein’s second arrest, a series of strange events unfolded.
This time, the victims were able to speak.
At the bail hearing, on July 18, 2019, one girl testified that Epstein had sexually abused her from the age of 14 onwards; another said she’d been 16.
Both hoped the judge would deny bail, which is exactly what he did.
But then, a few days later, strange things began to happen.
On July 23, Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with injuries to his neck.
He hadn’t been alone; Nicholas Tartaglione, a former cop accused of multiple murders, was his cellmate.
Tartaglione’s lawyer claims the two got along just fine, and his client had nothing to do with his injuries.
Though the cell had a camera, the video of the incident mysteriously vanished.
Epstein was placed on suicide watch, but this ended on July 30.
On August 9, his lawyers were with him throughout the day, discussing strategies to appeal the bail decision.
But that same day, Epstein’s newest cellmate, a drug dealer by the name of Efrain “Stone” Reyes, was transferred to a nearby privately run jail for cooperating witnesses.
Then, at some point that evening, the two guards monitoring Epstein fell asleep.
When they finally checked on Epstein around 6:30 the next morning, he was dead.
A makeshift noose made of cloth was around Epstein’s neck, which was reportedly tied to the top bunk.
The chief medical officer ruled it a suicide, but another pathologist at the autopsy said that the bones broken in Epstein’s neck and his bulging eyes were more consistent with strangulation.
Epstein’s lawyers don’t accept the suicide conclusion.
Brown doesn’t either.
Too many things don’t add up.
Either way, it’s deeply frustrating that so many questions have been left unanswered.
Some attention has shifted to Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and his other accomplices.
Trials are pending, and a trust has been established to provide settlements for his victims.
So far, over 175 survivors have filed claims, with over 67 million dollars being paid out.
It may not be justice, but it’s something.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks is that: Since the 1990s, the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein had been luring underage girls into his homes.
As part of an elaborate sex trafficking operation that spanned decades, he was raping them and coercing them into different sexual acts through offers of money, jobs, and tuition payments.
In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to lesser counts of prostitution of a minor.
Upon investigation by the author, this deal was revealed to be an unlawful injustice.
When Brown published her findings in 2018, it led to the FBI arresting Epstein in 2019.
Unfortunately, Epstein died in jail under mysterious circumstances, but his conspirators are still being prosecuted and the survivors of his abuse can continue to come forward to claim compensation.