Who protected Jeffrey Epstein?
The accused sex trafficker 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.”
The accusations against 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 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, Epstein faces up to 45 years in prison. This seems a reasonable, if belated, punishment for the rampant abuse of girls of which Epstein stands credibly accused.
But 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 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 Epstein that bent justice beyond its breaking point.
In exchange for pleading guilty to two state counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor, 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. 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.
At first glance, the Epstein saga looks like another example of how justice is not, in fact, blind — of how it tilts toward the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Epstein was not just wealthy; he was politically and socially wired, hobnobbing with such boldfaced names as Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
Upon closer examination, this case offers an even more warped picture of justice. Epstein retained a cadre of high- price, highprofile lawyers who went after prosecutors with everything they had — at least according to Mr. Acosta. During his 2017 confirmation hearings to become labor secretary, Mr. Acosta claimed to have forged the best deal possible under the circumstances.
That is hardly comforting. It betrays a system in which the rich and well- connected can bully public officials into quiescence — or into pursuing a deal so favorable to the accused that it runs afoul of the law.
Whatever new details emerge, whatever new participants may be implicated, whatever public officials are found to have failed in protecting Epstein’s victims, the time for secrecy and excuses and sweetheart deals is over. Epstein’s victims have waited long enough for answers, and they deserve justice.