NEW YORK — An indictment charging Jeffrey Epstein with sexually trafficking multiple underage girls was unsealed in federal court in New York City on Monday, the latest twist in a decade-old legal saga.
The globe-hopping multimillionaire was expected to appear later in the day during his arraignment at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. A throng of journalists had gathered to get a glimpse of the defendant.
The charging document says Epstein, from 2002 to at least 2005, enticed girls as young as 14 to come to his estates in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla., for what were supposed to be massages. Instead, he induced them to engage in sex acts, according to the indictment.
At a news conference late in the morning, Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, urged other victims to contact his office.
Saying the charges “shock the conscience,” he said the Justice Department will ask that Epstein remain locked up while awaiting trial, given his resources, private planes and homes around the world.
The case has gained notoriety in part because of Epstein’s wide circle of rich and influential friends, including President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
According to court documents, Epstein would pay the girls hundreds of dollars in cash after the encounters, then, in what resembled a sexual pyramid scheme, he would allegedly pay them more to recruit other young girls to perform similar acts.
The indictment states that the victims often came from troubled backgrounds, making them vulnerable to Epstein’s entreaties.
In 2007, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, had built a similar case against Epstein, going so far as to produce a 50-plus page indictment.
The indictment was discarded, though after Acosta — now Trump’s secretary of labor — secretly met one-on-one with one of Epstein’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, in October of that year, at a West Palm Beach Marriott.
The non-prosecution agreement immunized not just Epstein, now 66, but several other unnamed individuals.
As part of the deal at that time, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to two state prostitution charges involving a 17-year-old girl, and he served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail. The deal agreement sealed, however, so that no one — not even his victims — knew the details about the agreement until nearly a year later. By that time, Epstein had already been released from jail and had returned to his jet-setting life.
After remaining dormant for years, the case gained new attention last November when the Miami Herald published an investigation, Perversion of Justice, that described the extraordinary behind-the-scenes efforts made by prosecutors and defense attorneys to keep the non-prosecution agreement secret from victims, so they could not object.
Emails published as part of the series show how Epstein’s lawyers dictated the terms of the deal, which was not fully consummated until 2008
The Herald revelations have brought a rising chorus of calls for Acosta to resign or be fired from the president’s Cabinet.
Epstein was arrested Saturday at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport after returning from Paris on his private jet.
Three days earlier, 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..
As part of its investigation, the Miami Herald was able to identify nearly 80 girls who allegedly were molested by Epstein. Four of the victims, now in their late 20s and early 30s, spoke on video about how they were traumatized first by Epstein, then by his lawyers and private investigators, who delved deeply into their backgrounds and social media accounts, and finally by the prosecutors themselves, who disposed of the case without telling them.
One of the victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said that she was forced by Epstein and Maxwell to have sex with a number of wealthy and powerful politicians, academics and government leaders, including prominent attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. Both have denied having sex with Giuffre.
Giuffre has never named any other men, largely because she has been afraid, her lawyers said.
In October 2017, as the #MeToo movement spurred a national conversation about the sexual harassment and abuse of women, the Herald had already begun examining the Epstein case. Earlier that year, following Acosta’s nomination as labor secretary, the Herald began to take a closer look at what role he played in Epstein’s controversial plea bargain. In the 10 years since Epstein’s case was closed by the FBI, about two dozen civil court cases had been filed, often alleging that Epstein’s sex crimes with underage victims were far more serious than prosecutors led the public to believe.
The vast trove of litigation included tens of thousands of pages of court pleadings, motions, appeals, depositions, hearing transcripts, judges’ decisions, witness and victim statements, as well as emails and letters between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s defense lawyers.
Besides sorting through volumes of court documents, the Miami Herald also began the process of trying to locate Epstein’s victims — most of whom were labeled in court documents as Jane Does in order to protect their identities as minors. Many of the women said they had never told anyone of the abuse because they were too ashamed and already felt that the criminal justice system had failed them.
The Herald also obtained 10 years of public records connected to the Epstein criminal cases. These included the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office files, the Palm Beach police files, and records from the Florida Department of Corrections, the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice.
