Epstein accuser sues as questions linger
New state law opens up window for child victims.
As part of the fight over Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, a woman filed a lawsuit claiming he forcibly raped her when she was a teenager.
Jail guards on NEW YORK — duty the night Jeffrey Epstein apparently died by suicide are suspected of falsifying log entries to show they were checking on inmates every half-hour as required, according to a person familiar with the investigation into the financier’s death.
Surveillance video shows guards never made some of the checks noted in the log, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity Tuesday. In fact, several officials said that the two guards apparently fell asleep and failed to check on Epstein for about three hours.
In the days since the financier’s death, a picture has emerged of the Metropolitan Correctional Institution in New York as a chronically understaffed jail, with guards working overtime and other employees pressed into service as correctional officers.
Meanwhile, the fight over Epstein’s estate began taking shape, with a woman filing a lawsuit Wednesday claiming he raped her when she was a teenager in 2002.
Jennifer Araoz sued Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell and three unnamed members of his staff — the first of many lawsuits expected to be filed by Epstein’s accusers as a new state law went into effect Wednesday that opens up a one-year window for victims of long-ago sex crimes against children to take legal action.
“Today is my first step toward reclaiming my power Jeffrey Epstein and his enablers stole from me,” Araoz said. The AP names alleged victims of sexual offenses only if they consent to being identified, as Araoz has done.
The lawsuit accuses Maxwell of helping Epstein recruit teenage girls and providing “organizational support to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.”
Maxwell’s publicist and lawyers did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Maxwell, the socialite daughter of the late British publishing baron Robert Maxwell, previously denied wrongdoing, saying any allegations she was involved in arranging sex for Epstein were “abhorrent and entirely untrue.”
Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether any Epstein associates will face charges.
Epstein, 66, is believed to have killed himself early Saturday while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The cause of the death has not been announced, but a person familiar with operations at the lockup said Epstein was discovered in his cell with a bedsheet around his neck.
His death prompted the Justice Department to place two guards on leave and remove the jail’s warden pending the outcome of investigations by the FBI and the department’s inspector general. Falsifying log entries can be a federal crime.
The warden, Lamine N’Diaye, will be transferred to a Bureau of Prisons office in Philadelphia.
One of the staff members was a former correctional officer who had taken a different position at the detention center that did not involve guarding detainees. He had volunteered to work again as a correctional officer for the extra overtime pay, a law enforcement official and an employee at the jail said.
The second officer, a woman who was assigned to that wing, had been ordered to work overtime because the jail was short staffed.
James Petrucci, the warden at a federal prison in Otisville, New York, has been named acting warden of the Manhattan jail, officials said.
Some union leaders for prison workers expressed dismay with Barr’s decision to allow the warden to continue working, even as the two staff members were placed on leave.
“It makes me angry that they reassigned the warden,” said Jose Rojas, an official in the prison employees’ union and a teacher at the Coleman prison complex in Sumterville, Florida. “They didn’t put him on administrative leave like the others. The warden made the call to take Epstein off suicide watch and to remove his cellmate. That is egregious.”
In her lawsuit and in interviews, Araoz said she was a 14-year-old freshman at a performing arts high school near Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2001 when she was approached on the sidewalk by an unidentified woman in her 20s who invited her to meet the financier.