Epstein’s victims get second chance

Appeals court agrees to rehear claims

Court agreed to rehear claims that federal prosecutors violated victims’ rights with secret plea deal.

A group of women who were sexually exploited by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein when they were young have won the right to challenge the 2007 agreement with prosecutors that ultimately let Epstein off the hook.

The ruling Friday by the full nine-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns an April ruling by a three-judge panel on the same circuit that had denied victims the right to challenge the widely criticized non-prosecution agreement.

That deal, negotiated in part by then Assistant U.S. Attorney and former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, allowed Epstein to avoid charges in federal court and instead face much laxer charges in state court in Palm Beach County.

In challenging the nonprosecution agreement, Courtney Wilde and the other victim alleged that prosecutors had struck a fundamentally illegal deal with the rich, powerful and well connected Epstein in 2007 in part by agreeing to pursue the lesser charges without consulting Epstein’s alleged victims or their lawyers.

Epstein is alleged to have raped and sexually trafficked dozens of underage girls to rich associates all over the world.

But the non-prosecution agreement between Epstein and the feds ultimately meant he ended up serving only 13 months in jail, which he left regularly to go to his office.

The April ruling had originally held that Wild and another unnamed victim did not have the right to sue to invalidate the deal struck between the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and Jeffrey Epstein in 2008, holding that non-prosecution agreement between the feds and Epstein did not violate a law known as the federal Crime Victims’ Rights act.

But a sharp dissent by one of the judges in the three-judge panel ultimately led to Friday’s decision, which reversed course, granting Wilde and the second victim the chance to challenge the agreement.

Friday’s ruling does not invalidate the non-prosecution agreement.

Epstein died while in the custody of the federal bureau of prisons in August 2019 while awaiting federal sex trafficking charges brought against him by the U.S. Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York.

His alleged confident and madame, Ghislaine Maxwell, is being held in the same Manhattan jail while awaiting similar charges brought by the same office.