Julie K. Brown - Perversion of Justice. The Jeffrey Epstein Story

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL OF JEFFREY EPSTEINS

SURVIVORS,

especially

MICHELLE LICATA,

COURTNEY WILD,

VIRGINIA GIUFFRE, AND

JENA-LISA JONES.

with special thanks to

MICHAEL REITER

and the late

JOE RECAREY.

Contents

In September 2006, Detective Joe Recarey handed state prosecutors in South Florida a textbook underage sex case he thought would be a no-brainer to prosecute.

For at least six years, multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Edward Epstein, fifty-three, and others working for him had been luring middle school and high school girls to his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, by offering to pay them for massages. The girls, mostly thirteen to sixteen years old, arrived at all hours of the day and night, whereupon they were sexually abused in acts ranging from inappropriate touching to rape.

Afterward, Epstein paid them two to three hundred dollars each, then offered to give them even more money if the teenagers brought their friends, creating a revolving door of fresh young girls to fill his pedophile obsession.

Epstein was wealthy enough to buy anything he wanted, including prostitutes. But he didnt want experienced women; his preferred prey were waiflike prepubescent girls from troubled backgrounds who needed money and had little or no sexual experience.

These were girls he thought no one would believe, and Epstein and his accomplices would do everything in their power to silence them.

Palm Beach police nevertheless did their due diligence, interviewing about three dozen girls and building a solid criminal case. They compiled thick files of evidence to support the girls accounts, including phone records and messages, documents, plane manifests, and witnesses

statements.

Epstein hired the flamboyant Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who met with Barry Krischer, the Palm Beach state attorney responsible for prosecuting the case. Soon, criminal prosecutors were no longer scrutinizing Epstein; they were excoriating his underage victims.

Over the course of a year, everything that Recarey believed about justice was shaken to its core. Krischer, seemingly dazzled by Dershowitzs fame, would turn his back on the victims and the police working the case; Epstein and the private investigators hired by his lawyers stalked and threatened the girls and their families, tearing their lives apart. Ultimately, the FBI would take over the investigation. The man who would oversee the federal case was a young, rising star in the Republican Party who had ambitions to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Rene Alexander Acosta, thirty-seven, was sworn in as U.S. attorney in Miami in October 2006, just as the FBI began to suspect that Epsteins crimes went well beyond South Florida.

Epstein had given liberally to Democratic candidates and causes, but he knew that if he wanted the Republicans then in the White House in his corner, he needed someone with clout in Washington. His legal dream team included Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who had employed his skills of moral outrage and prosecutorial kill to make the case for President Bill Clintons 1998 impeachment.

Citing a solemn intent to ensure fairness and integrity in the administration of justice, Starr asked the Justice Department to essentially quash the federal case that prosecutors in Miami were mounting against Epstein.

Despite their opposite political alliances, Starr and Epstein had some things in common: both were adept at cultivating power and had an arsenal of tricks at their disposal to outwit people to whatever ends met their goals.

Sure enough, in 2008, Epstein and his high-priced lawyers wrangled an unusual plea bargain from federal prosecutors, one that defied some of our nations most basic legal principles.

Acosta would later contend that he agreed to give Epstein federal immunity from sex trafficking charges based on the unlikely success that prosecutors felt they would have at trial.

Even with the little bit that I knew about the case in 2016, this never made sense to me. After all, immunity is a benefit granted in exchange for something else of value to prosecutors. What, if anything, did federal authorities get for giving Epstein and his co-conspiratorsboth named and unnamedimmunity?

Over the past decade, much had been written about this case by countless journalists. But little of it offered real insight into how someone so evil was able to manipulate so many peoplefrom the offices of Wall Street to the corridors of the Department of Justice.

By 2016, the Jeffrey Epstein case seemed to be just a footnote in history.

I felt the story needed a more rigorous analysis, and so I set out to unpack the case and take a fresh look. I wanted to learn how and why such a prolific child sex predator could get away with his crimes.

I learned that there were plenty of people who knew what Epstein was doing, not only in Palm Beach, but in New York and on his private island, as he flaunted his young conquests at dinner parties and events he attended with well-heeled, socially and politically connected people, some of whom worked in the media, led billion-dollar companies, and had Nobel Prizes on their rsums.

Even when it later became clear that Epstein had been exploiting and abusing girls, his friends, professional acquaintances, and those who wanted the benefit of his checkbook continued to associate with him.

In liberal circles, political analysts who studied the case often focused on Epsteins connection to Donald Trump, while conservatives tried to link the scandal to Bill Clinton.

The truth is there were powerful people on both sides of the political rails

as well as people in the worlds of finance, academia, and sciencewho were involved with Epstein or, at the very least, complicit with what he was doing.

I also learned that Epstein likely conducted video surveillance in every home he owned. As insurance, he probably had tapes and photographs of important visitorsmainly menin compromising situations. Whether that was true or not, even the possibility that he had blackmail material was

enough motive for many powerful people to do everything possible to cover up Epsteins crimes.

THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN STORY EPITOMIZES OUR NATIONS

LOPSIDED system of justice, and how victims of sexual assault, especially those who are young and poor, are discarded, shamed, and mistreated by the very people who are supposed to protect them.

Epstein got away with his crimes because nearly every element of society allowed him to get away with them. Professional, legal, and moral ethics were set aside for a broken system of values that places corporate profits, personal wealth, political connections, and celebrity above some of the most sacred tenets of our faiths, our teachings, and our democracy.

When I became a journalist, I learned that the most rewarding part of my work was in righting injustices for those who could not fight for themselves.

Few people seemed to recognize that Epstein not only beat the system

but he was probably still hunting, terrorizing, and abusing young women and girls.

I would face many obstacles on my path to the truth. I would be attacked by the legal forces who failed their solemn oaths, by the defense attorneys who profited off Epsteins crimesand by some of those within my own industry who thought that what I was doing was nothing more than a rehash of an old story.