General Epstein Articles

[admin]

PART ONE

How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime
by Julie K. Brown
Nov. 28, 2018
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 97825.html

On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.

It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush.

Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44, a U.S. special envoy to North Korea and corporate lawyer, the meeting was critical.

His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

[x]
Jeffrey Epstein’s waterfront Palm Beach home on El Brillo Way. in addition to his Palm Beach home, Epstein owns a residence in New York City and on a private island in the U.S. Islands. Epstein has been accused of molesting hundreds of young girls in his homes. Emily Michot
[email protected] The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.

Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.


The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.

As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.

This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them.

“I don’t think anyone has been told the truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did,’’ said one of Epstein’s victims, Michelle Licata, now 30. “He ruined my life and a lot of girls’ lives. People need to know what he did and why he wasn’t prosecuted so it never happens again.”

Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Until he was reported to be eliminated on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, Acosta also had been included on lists of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.

Acosta did not respond to numerous requests for an interview or answer queries through email.

[x]
Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida when he negotiated an end to the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. Florida International University

But court records reveal details of the negotiations and the role that Acosta would play in arranging the deal, which scuttled the federal probe into a possible international sex trafficking operation. Among other things, Acosta allowed Epstein’s lawyers unusual freedoms in dictating the terms of the non-prosecution agreement.

“The damage that happened in this case is unconscionable,” said Bradley Edwards, a former state prosecutor who represents some of Epstein’s victims. “How in the world, do you, the U.S. attorney, engage in a negotiation with a criminal defendant, basically allowing that criminal defendant to write up the agreement?”

As a result, neither the victims — nor even the judge — would know how many girls Epstein allegedly sexually abused between 2001 and 2005, when his underage sex activities were first uncovered by police. Police referred the case to the FBI a year later, when they began to suspect that their investigation was being undermined by the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office.

NOT A ‘HE SAID, SHE SAID’

“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.

More than a decade later, at a time when Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood actresses have become a catalyst for a cultural reckoning about sexual abuse, Epstein’s victims have all but been forgotten.

The women — now in their late 20s and early 30s — are still fighting for an elusive justice that even the passage of time has not made right.

Like other victims of sexual abuse, they believe they’ve been silenced by a criminal justice system that stubbornly fails to hold Epstein and other wealthy and powerful men accountable.

“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein.

[x]
Courtney Wild, 30, was a victim of serial sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein beginning at the age of 14. Epstein paid Wild, and many other underage girls, to give him massages, often having them undress and perform sexual acts. Epstein also used the girls as recruiters, paying them to bring him other underage girls. Emily Michot [email protected]

Over the past year, the Miami Herald examined a decade’s worth of court documents, lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents. Key people involved in the investigation — most of whom have never spoken before — were also interviewed. The Herald also obtained new records, including the full unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation and witness statements that had been kept under seal.

The Herald learned that, as part of the plea deal, Epstein provided what the government called “valuable consideration” for unspecified information he supplied to federal investigators. While the documents obtained by the Herald don’t detail what the information was, Epstein’s sex crime case happened just as the country’s subprime mortgage market collapsed, ushering in the 2008 global financial crisis.

Records show that Epstein was a key federal witness in the criminal prosecution of two prominent executives with Bear Stearns, the global investment brokerage that failed in 2008, who were accused of corporate securities fraud. Epstein was one of the largest investors in the hedge fund managed by the executives, who were later acquitted. It is not known what role, if any, the case played in Epstein’s plea negotiations.

The Herald also identified about 80 women who say they were molested or otherwise sexually abused by Epstein from 2001 to 2006. About 60 of them were located — now scattered around the country and abroad. Eight of them agreed to be interviewed, on or off the record. Four of them were willing to speak on video.

The women are now mothers, wives, nurses, bartenders, Realtors, hairdressers and teachers. One is a Hollywood actress. Several have grappled with trauma, depression and addiction. Some have served time in prison.

A few did not survive. One young woman was found dead last year in a rundown motel in West Palm Beach. She overdosed on heroin and left behind a young son.

As part of Epstein’s agreement, he was required to register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the three dozen victims identified by the FBI. In many cases, the confidential financial settlements came only after Epstein’s attorneys exposed every dark corner of their lives in a scorched-earth effort to portray the girls as gold diggers.

“You beat yourself up mentally and physically,’’ said Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, who said Epstein molested her when she was 14. “You can’t ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something. For me, it is the word ‘pure’ because he called me ‘pure’ in that room and then I remember what he did to me in that room.’’

Now, more than a decade later, two unrelated civil lawsuits — one set for trial on Dec. 4 — could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. The Dec. 4 case, in Palm Beach County state court, involves Epstein and Edwards, whom Epstein had accused of legal misdeeds in representing several victims. The case is noteworthy because it will mark the first time that Epstein’s victims will have their day in court, and several of them are scheduled to testify.

[x]
Jena Lisa Jones spends time with her 18-month-old son Raymond. Jones says that she is a victim of sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Jones says she was just 14 when she was introduced to Epstein and was paid $200 by him to give him a massage at his home. Jones says Epstein told her to take off all of her clothes and that he fondled her during the massage. Epstein pleaded guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14. Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He served 13 months at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office Stockade Facility, much of the time outside of the gates on ‘work release.’ Emily Michot [email protected]

A second lawsuit, known as the federal Crime Victims’ Rights suit, is still pending in South Florida after a decade of legal jousting. It seeks to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement in hopes of sending Epstein to federal prison. Wild, who has never spoken publicly until now, is Jane Doe No. 1 in “Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2 vs. the United States of America,” a federal lawsuit that alleges Epstein’s federal non-prosecution agreement was illegal.

Federal prosecutors, including Acosta, not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.

“As soon as that deal was signed, they silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’ said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’

In court papers, federal prosecutors have argued that they did not violate the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because no federal charges were ever filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, an argument that was later dismissed by the judge.

Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.

“She was taken advantage of twice — first by Epstein, and then by the criminal justice system that labeled a 14-year-old girl as a prostitute,’’ said Spencer Kuvin, the lawyer who represented the girl.

“It’s just outrageous how they minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’ said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women.

“There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.

It would be easy to dismiss the Epstein case as another example of how there are two systems of justice in America, one for the rich and one for the poor. But a thorough analysis of the case tells a far more troubling story.

A close look at the trove of letters and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent court documents, admitted was unorthodox.

Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.

‘AVOID THE PRESS’ PLAN

That included keeping the deal from Epstein’s victims, emails show.

“Thank you for the commitment you made to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,’’ Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after their breakfast meeting in West Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential.

“You ... assured me that your office would not ... contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants and the respective counsel in this matter,’’ Lefkowitz wrote.

In email after email, Acosta and the lead federal prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, acquiesced to Epstein’s legal team’s demands, which often focused on ways to limit the scandal by shutting out his victims and the media, including suggesting that the charges be filed in Miami, instead of Palm Beach, where Epstein’s victims lived.

“On an ‘avoid the press’ note ... I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’ Villafaña wrote to Lefkowitz in a September 2007 email.

Federal prosecutors identified 36 underage victims, but none of those victims appeared at his sentencing on June 30, 2008, in state court in Palm Beach County. Most of them heard about it on the news — and even then they didn’t understand what had happened to the federal probe that they’d been assured was ongoing.

Edwards filed an emergency motion in federal court to block the non-prosecution agreement, but by the time the agreement was unsealed — over a year later — Epstein had already served his sentence and been released from jail.

[x]
Attorney Brad Edwards is representing several young women who were sexually abused as minors by Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Edwards Ft. Lauderdale law office is packed with files for the Epstein case. Emily Michot [email protected]

“The conspiracy between the government and Epstein was really ‘let’s figure out a way to make the whole thing go away as quietly as possible,’ ’’ said Edwards, who represents Wild and Jane Doe No. 2, who declined to comment for this story.

“In never consulting with the victims, and keeping it secret, it showed that someone with money can buy his way out of anything.’’

It was far from the last time Epstein would receive VIP handling. Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

[x]
Jeffrey Epstein, accused of being a serial abuser of underage women, grins for his mugshot. He once compared his alleged crimes to ‘stealing a bagel.’ Florida sex offender registry

The sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, would not answer questions, submitted by the Miami Herald, about Epstein’s work release.

Neither Epstein nor his lead attorney, Jack Goldberger, responded to multiple requests for comment for this story. During depositions taken as part of two dozen lawsuits filed against him by his victims, Epstein has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, in one instance doing so more than 200 times.

In the past, his lawyers have said that the girls lied about their ages, that their stories were exaggerated or untrue and that they were unreliable witnesses prone to drug use.

In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender — the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.

A prosecutor under New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case. Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender accused of molesting so many girls.

“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward argument like this,’’ she said.

THE HOUSE ON EL BRILLO

The women who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion as girls tend to divide their lives into two parts: life before Jeffrey and life after Jeffrey.

Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an A-student at Lake Worth Middle School.

After she met Epstein, she was a stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in Florida’s Panhandle.

Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.

She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. Wild, who later helped recruit other girls, said Epstein preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further each time.

“By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in my life for years,” said Wild, who was released from prison in October after serving three years on drug charges.

The girls — mostly 13 to 16 — were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man — Epstein — a massage, according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the Herald.

The lead Palm Beach police detective on the case, Joseph Recarey, said Epstein’s operation worked like a sexual pyramid scheme.

[x]
Former Palm Beach County Police Detective Joe Recarey was the lead detective on the solicitation-of-minors case against billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Emily Michot [email protected]

“The common interview with a girl went like this: ‘I was brought there by so and so. I didn’t feel comfortable with what happened, but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn’t feel comfortable, I could bring someone else and still get paid,’ ’’ Recarey said.

During the massage sessions, Recarey said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls.

Recarey, in his first interview about the case, said the evidence the department collected to support the girls’ stories was overwhelming, including phone call records, copies of written phone messages from the girls found in Epstein’s trash and Epstein’s flight logs, which showed his private plane in Palm Beach on the days the girls were scheduled to give him massages.

Epstein could be a generous benefactor, Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young girl to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after one of his girls starred in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for one of the girls were discovered in a search of his mansion and trash. Police also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.

Epstein counseled the girls about their schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school, fashion design or acting. At least two of Epstein’s victims told police that they were in love with him, according to the police report.

The police report shows how uncannily consistent the girls’ stories were — right down to their detailed descriptions of Epstein’s genitalia.

“We had victims who didn’t know each other, never met each other and they all basically independently told the same story,’’ said Reiter, the retired Palm Beach police chief.

[x]
Michael Reiter is the former Chief of Police in Palm Beach. Reiter was Chief during the investigation of Palm Beach resident Jeffrey Epstein. Emily Michot [email protected]

Reiter, also speaking for the first time, said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of young girls coming and going from his house, the frequency — sometimes several in the same day — and the young ages of the girls.

“It started out to give a man a back rub, but in many cases it turned into something far worse than that, elevated to a serious crime, in some cases sexual batteries,’’ he said.

Most of the girls said they arrived by car or taxi, and entered the side door, where they were led into a kitchen by a female staff assistant named Sarah Kellen, the report said. A chef might prepare them a meal or offer them cereal. The girls — most from local schools — would then ascend a staircase off the kitchen, up to a large master bedroom and bath.

They were met by Epstein, clad in a towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie facedown on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully, and direct them to massage his feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples, while he masturbated, according to the police report.

At times, if emboldened, he would try to penetrate them with his fingers or use a vibrator on them. He would go as far as the girls were willing to let him, including intercourse, according to police documents. Sometimes he would instruct a young woman he described as his Yugoslavian sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova, who was over 18, to join in, the girls told Recarey. Epstein often took photographs of the girls having sex and displayed them around the house, the detective said.

Once sexually gratified, Epstein would take a shower in his massive bathroom, which the girls described as having a large shower and a hot pink and mint green sofa.

Kellen (now Vickers) and Marcinkova, through their attorneys, declined to comment for this story.

NEVER ENOUGH

One girl told police that she was approached by an Epstein recruiter when she was 16, and was working at the Wellington mall. Over the course of more than a year, she went to Epstein’s house hundreds of times, she said. The girl tearfully told Recarey that she often had sex with Marcinkova — who employed strap-on dildos and other toys — while Epstein watched and choreographed her moves to please himself, according to the police report. Often times, she said, she was so sore after the encounters that she could barely walk, the police report said.

But she said she was firm about not wanting to have intercourse with Epstein. One day, however, the girl said that Epstein, unable to control himself, held her down on a massage table and penetrated her, the police report said. The girl, who was 16 or 17 at the time, said that Epstein apologized and paid her $1,000, the police report said.

Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her 8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald.

Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness.

“We were stupid, poor children,’’ said one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about Epstein. At the time, she said, she was 14 and a high school freshman.

“We just wanted money for school clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there.”

The woman, who went to Epstein’s home multiple times, said Epstein didn’t like her because her breasts were too big. The last time she went, she said, one girl came out crying and they were instructed to leave the house and had to pay for their own cab home.

Some girls told police they were coached by their peer recruiters to lie to Epstein about their ages and say they were 18. Epstein’s legal team would later claim that even if the girls were under 18, there was no way he could have known. However, under Florida law, ignorance of a sex partner’s age is not a defense for having sex with a minor.

Wild said he was well aware of their tender ages — because he demanded they be young.

“He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,’’ she said, explaining that as she grew older and had less access to young girls, Epstein got increasingly angry with her inability to find him the young girls he desired.

“If I had a girl to bring him at breakfast, lunch and dinner, then that’s how many times I would go a day. He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough.’’

THE PYRAMID CRUMBLES

Epstein’s scheme first began to unravel in March 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Palm Beach police that she had been molested by Epstein at his mansion. The girl reluctantly confessed that she had been brought there by two other girls, and those girls pointed to two more girls who had been there.

By the time detectives tracked down one victim, there were two and three more to find. Soon there were dozens.

[x]
Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane, which is painted a distinctive shade of blue, is parked at Palm Beach International Airport Thursday morning, May 24, 2018. The plane landed at the airport Wednesday May 23, 2018. Emily Michot

“We didn’t know where the victims would ever end,” Reiter said.

Eventually, the girls told them about still other girls and young women they had seen at Epstein’s house, many of whom didn’t speak English, Recarey said. That led Recarey to suspect that Epstein’s exploits weren’t just confined to Palm Beach. Police obtained the flight logs for his private plane, and found female names and initials among the list of people who flew on the aircraft — including the names of some famous and powerful people who had also been passengers, Recarey said.

A newly released FBI report shows that at the time the non-prosecution deal was executed, the agency was interviewing witnesses and victims “from across the United States.” The probe stretched from Florida to New York and New Mexico, records show. The report was released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by Radar Online and was made available on the bureau’s website after the Miami Herald and other news organizations submitted requests, said Daniel Novack, the lawyer who filed the Freedom of Information Act case pro bono.

One lawsuit, still pending in New York, alleges that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil. The girls lived in a New York building owned by Epstein, who paid for their visas, according to the sworn statement of Maritza Vasquez, the one-time bookkeeper for Mc2, the modeling agency.

Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he said.

[x]
Mike Fisten is a private investigator for victims’ attorneys in the sexual abuse cases against Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Emily Michot [email protected]

“The day that a sitting U.S. attorney is afraid of a lawyer or afraid of a defendant is a very sad day in this country,’’ said Fisten, now a private investigator for Edwards.

SUIT/COUNTERSUIT

Now, a complex web of litigation could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. A lawsuit, set for trial Dec. 4 in Palm Beach County, involves the notorious convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein, in whose law firm Edwards once worked.

In 2009, Epstein sued Edwards, alleging that Edwards was involved with Rothstein and was using the girls’ civil lawsuits to perpetuate Rothstein’s massive Ponzi operation. But Rothstein said Edwards didn’t know about the scheme, and Epstein dropped the lawsuit.

Edwards countersued for malicious prosecution, arguing that Epstein sued him to retaliate for his aggressive representation of Epstein’s victims.

Several women who went to Epstein’s home as underage girls are scheduled to testify against him for the first time.

Florida state Sen. Lauren Book, a child sex abuse survivor who has lobbied for tough sex offender laws, said Epstein’s case should serve as a tipping point for criminal cases involving sex crimes against children.

“Where is the righteous indignation for these women? Where are the protectors? Who is banging down the doors of the secretary of labor, or the judge or the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach County, demanding justice and demanding the right to be heard?’’ Book asked.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Villafaña, in court papers, said that prosecutors used their “best efforts’’ to comply with the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but exercised their “prosecutorial discretion’’ when they chose not to notify the victims. The reasoning went like this: The non-prosecution deal had a restitution clause that provided the girls a chance to seek compensation from Epstein. Had the deal fallen through, necessitating a trial, Epstein’s lawyers might have used the prior restitution clause to undermine the girls’ credibility as witnesses, by claiming they had exaggerated Epstein’s behavior in hopes of cashing in.

Acosta has never fully explained why he felt it was in the best interests of the underage girls — and their parents — for him to keep the agreement sealed. Or why the FBI investigation was closed even as, recently released documents show, the case was yielding more victims and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy beyond Palm Beach.

Upon his nomination by Trump as labor secretary in 2017, Acosta was questioned about the Epstein case during a Senate confirmation hearing.

“At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decided that a plea that guarantees someone goes to jail, that guarantees he register [as a sex offender] generally and guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing,’’ Acosta said of his decision to not prosecute Epstein federally.

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in opposing Acosta for labor secretary, noted that “his handling of a case involving sex trafficking of underage girls when he was a U.S. attorney suggests he won’t put the interests of workers and everyday people ahead of the powerful and well-connected.’’

Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is one of the nation’s leading advocates for reforming laws involving sex crimes against children, said what Acosta and other prosecutors did is similar to what the Catholic Church did to protect pedophile priests.

“The real crime with the Catholic priests was the way they covered it up and shielded the priests,’’ Hamilton said. “The orchestration of power by men only is protected as long as everybody agrees to keep it secret. This is a story the world needs to hear.’’

This article has been updated to acknowledge Radar Online’s role in securing the release of FBI documents on Jeffrey Epstein and to eliminate a reference to Courtney Wild’s age when she stopped recruiting for Epstein. Wild now says she is not sure how old she was, but her lawyer says she would have been younger than 21, the age she had stated in an interview.

[admin]

PART TWO

Cops worked to put serial sex abuser in prison. Prosecutors worked to cut him a break
BY JULIE K. BROWN
NOV. 28, 2018
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 10674.html

Palm Beach, Florida November 2004 Jane Doe Michelle Licata climbed a narrow, winding staircase, past walls covered with photographs of naked girls. At the top of the stairwell was a vast master bed and bath, with cream-colored shag carpeting and a hot pink and mint green sofa. The room was dimly lit and very cold. There was a vanity, a massage table and a timer. A silver-haired man wearing nothing but a white towel came into the room. He lay facedown on a massage table, and while talking on a phone, directed Licata to rub his back, legs and feet. Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexually abusing Michelle Licata and suspected of abusing scores of other middle school and high school-aged girls at his waterfront home in Palm Beach. Emily Michot [email protected] After he hung up, the man turned over and dropped his towel, exposing himself. He told Licata to get comfortable and then, in a firm voice, told her to take off her clothes. At 16, Licata had never before been fully naked in front of anyone. Shaking and panicked, she mechanically pulled off her jeans and stripped down to her underwear. He set the timer for 30 minutes and then reached over and unsnapped her bra. He then began touching her with one hand and masturbating himself with the other. “I kept looking at the timer because I didn’t want to have this mental image of what he was doing,’’ she remembered of the massage. “He kept trying to put his fingers inside me and told me to pinch his nipples. He was mostly saying ‘just do that, harder, harder and do this. …’ ” After he ejaculated, he stood up and walked to the shower, dismissing her as if she had been in history class. It wasn’t long before a lot of Licata’s fellow students at Royal Palm Beach High School had heard about “a creepy old guy” named Jeffrey who lived in a pink waterfront mansion and was paying girls $200 to $300 to give him massages that quickly turned sexual. Eventually, the Palm Beach police, and then the FBI, came knocking on Licata’s door. In the police report, Licata was referred to as a Jane Doe in order to protect her identity as a minor. As seen from the air, the Palm Beach home of registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Pedro Portal [email protected] There would be many Jane Does to follow: Jane Doe No. 3, Jane Doe No. 4, Jane Does 5, 6, 7, 8 — and as the years went by — Jane Does 102 and 103. Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women’s movement about sexual assault — and a decade before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and U.S. Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar — there was Jeffrey Edward Epstein. Epstein, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager whose friends included a constellation of entertainers, politicians, business titans and royalty, for years lured teenage girls to his Palm Beach mansion as part of a cult-like sex pyramid scheme, police in the town of Palm Beach found. The girls arrived, sometimes by taxi, for trysts at all hours of the day and night. Few were told much more than that they would be paid to give an old man a massage — and that he might ask them to strip down to their underwear or get naked. But what began as a massage often led to masturbation, oral sex, intercourse and other sex acts, police and court records show. The alleged abuse dates back to 2001 and went on for years. In 2007, despite ample physical evidence and multiple witnesses corroborating the girls’ stories, federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers quietly put together a remarkable deal for Epstein, then 54. He agreed to plead guilty to two felony prostitution charges in state court, and in exchange, he and his accomplices received immunity from federal sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life. He served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade. His alleged co-conspirators, who helped schedule his sex sessions, were never prosecuted. The deal, called a federal non-prosecution agreement, was sealed so that no one — not even his victims — could know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes and who else was involved. The U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, was personally involved in the negotiations, records, letters and emails show. Acosta is now a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. As U.S. secretary of labor, he has oversight over international child labor laws and human trafficking and had recently been mentioned as a possible successor to former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure in early November. It was reported on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, that he was no longer in the running. Alexander Acosta, who was U.S. attorney for Southern Florida when law officers brought him the Jeffrey Epstein case, defended his decision to shelve a 53-page draft indictment charging Epstein with sex trafficking. CRISTOBAL HERRERA TNS The Miami Herald analyzed thousands of pages of court records and lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents, and also identified more than 80 women who say they were victimized. They are scattered around the country and abroad. Until now, those victims — today in their late 20s and early 30s — have never spoken publicly about how they felt shamed, silenced and betrayed by the very people in the criminal justice system who were supposed to hold Epstein accountable. “How come people who don’t have money get sent to jail — and can’t even make bail — and they have to do their time and sit there and think about what they did wrong? He had no repercussions and doesn’t even believe he did anything wrong,’’ said Licata, now 30. Michelle Licata, 30, is overcome with emotion while discussing her sexual encounters with Jeffrey Epstein. ‘He had no repercussions and doesn’t even believe he did anything wrong,’ she said. Emily Michot [email protected] Licata is among 36 women who were officially identified by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office as victims of Epstein, now 65. But after the FBI case was closed in 2008, witnesses and alleged victims testified in civil court that there were hundreds of girls who were brought to Epstein’s homes, including girls from Europe, Latin America and former Soviet Republic countries. But Acosta and Epstein’s armada of attorneys — Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz, Gerald Lefcourt, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, Guy Lewis and former Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr — reached a consensus: Epstein would never serve time in a federal or state prison. Read Next SOUTH FLORIDA Sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein was surrounded by powerful people. Here’s a sampling November 28, 2018 8:00 AM POLICE UNDER PRESSURE There were really just two people willing to risk their careers to go after Epstein: Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter and Detective Joseph Recarey. For Reiter, business tycoon Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t any more formidable than any of the other 8,000 or so wealthy and powerful people living on the island. Police had handled sensational cases involving wealthy residents before — from the murders of heiresses to the rape case involving William Kennedy Smith, of the Kennedy family. The easternmost town in Florida, Palm Beach is a 10.4-square-mile barrier island between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean populated by some of the richest people in the country. President Trump has his “winter White House” in Palm Beach, and the town makes news as much for its glitz as it does for its unusual efforts to preserve its well-mannered image, like banning shirtless joggers. But it was a little surprising, even to Reiter, to learn that one of its residents had a revolving door of middle and high school girls coming to his gated compound throughout the day and night. In their first on-the-record media interviews about the case, Reiter and Recarey revealed new details about the investigation, and how they were, in their view, pressured by then-Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer to downgrade the case to a misdemeanor or drop it altogether. Former Palm Beach County Police Detective Joseph Recarey was the lead detective on the solicitation-of-minors case against the multimillionaire Epstein. Emily Michot [email protected] Between March of 2005 — when the case was opened — and seven months later, when police executed a search warrant at Epstein’s home, Recarey had identified 21 possible victims, according to a copy of the unredacted police report obtained by the Herald. By the time police felt they had enough evidence to arrest Epstein on sex charges, they had identified about 35 possible underage victims and were tracking down at least a dozen more, the police report said. “I was surprised at how quickly it snowballed. I thought at some point there would be a last interview, but the next victim would supply me with three or four more names and the next one had three or four names and it just kept getting bigger and bigger,’’ Recarey said. By then, word had gotten back to Epstein from some of the girls that they had been questioned by police. Epstein hired famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz. “Alan Dershowitz flew down and met privately with Krischer,’’ Recarey said. “And the shenanigans that happened, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of before.’’ Police reports show that Epstein’s private investigators attempted to conduct interviews while posing as cops; that they picked through Reiter’s trash in search of dirt to discredit him; and that the private investigators were accused of following the girls and their families. In one case, the father of one girl claimed he had been run off the road by a private investigator, police and court reports show. Several of the girls said they felt intimidated and frightened by Epstein and Sarah Kellen, the millionaire’s assistant and alleged scheduler of massages, who warned them not to talk to police, according to the police report. Dershowitz, in an interview with the Herald, said he had nothing to do with gathering background on the girls — or in directing anyone to follow the police, or the girls and their families. “I’m not an investigator. My only job was to negotiate and try the case when it comes to trial,’’ he said. He nevertheless convinced Krischer that the girls would not be credible on the witness stand, according to Reiter and Recarey. The defense team’s investigators compiled dossiers on the victims in an effort to show that Epstein’s accusers had troubled pasts. Dershowitz met with Krischer and Recarey, sharing with them the results of an investigation into one of the girls, described by Dershowitz as “an accomplished drama student’’ who hurled profanities at his investigator at “a furious pace.’’ According to Palm Beach police, State Attorney Barry Krischer was initially ready to prosecute a major case against Epstein, but ultimately lost interest. “Our investigation had discovered at least one of her websites and I am enclosing some examples ... the site goes on to detail, including photos, her apparent fascination with marijuana, ’’ Dershowitz wrote in an undated letter to Recarey. He also disputed the claim that one of the defense team’s private investigators had misrepresented himself as a police officer. Recarey stood his ground. “His attorneys showed us a MySpace page where one of the girls was holding a beer in her hand, and they said, ‘oh look, she is underage drinking,’ ’’ Recarey recalled. “Well, tell me what teenager doesn’t? Does that mean she isn’t a victim because she drank a beer? Basically, what you’re telling me is the only victim of a sexual battery could be a nun.’’ Krischer and the lead state prosecutor on the case, Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek, began to dodge Recarey and Reiter’s phone calls and emails, and they dragged their feet on approving subpoenas, Reiter and Recarey said. “Early on, it became clear that things had changed, from Krischer saying, ‘we’ll put this guy away for life,’ to ‘these are all the reasons why we aren’t going to prosecute this,’ ’’ Reiter said. Krischer, who is now retired and in private practice, did not respond to multiple requests from the Herald for comment. Belohlavek also did not respond to an email sent to her office. “It became apparent to me that some of our evidence was being leaked to Epstein’s lawyers, who began to question everything that we had in our probable cause affidavit,’’ Reiter said. The day of the search on Oct. 20, 2005, they found that most of Epstein’s computer hard drives, surveillance cameras and videos had been removed from the house, leaving loose, dangling wires, according to the police report. But the girls’ description of the house squared with what detectives found, right down to the hot pink couch and the dresser drawer of sex toys in Epstein’s bathroom. Reiter said his own trash was disappearing from his house, as his life was put under Epstein’s microscope. Private investigators hired by Epstein’s lawyers even tracked down Reiter’s grade school teachers, the former chief said. Questions were raised about donations that Epstein had made to the police department, even though Reiter had returned one of the donations shortly after the investigation began. Recarey, meanwhile, said he began to take different routes to and from work, and even switched vehicles because he knew he was being tailed. “At some point it became like a cat-and-mouse game. I would stop at a red light and go. I knew they were there, and they knew I knew they were there. I was concerned about my kids because I didn’t know if it was someone that they hired just out of prison that would hurt me or my family,’’ Recarey said. Despite relentless political pressure, Reiter and Recarey soldiered on, and their determination yielded evidence that supported most of the girls’ allegations, the former cops said. They had phone records that showed Epstein and his assistant, Kellen, had called many of the girls. Epstein’s flight logs showed that the calls were made when Epstein was in Palm Beach. They obtained dozens of message pads from his home that read like a who’s who of famous people, including magician David Copperfield and Donald Trump, an indication of Epstein’s vast circle of influential friends. There were also messages from girls, and their phone numbers matched those of many of the girls Recarey had interviewed, Recarey said. They read: “Courtney called, she can come at 4,’’ or “Tanya can’t come at 7 p.m. tomorrow because she has soccer practice.’’ They also found naked photographs of underage girls in Epstein’s closet, Recarey said. There were also witnesses: Two of Epstein’s butlers gave Recarey sworn interviews, confirming that young girls had been coming and going at the house. One of the butlers, Alfredo Rodriguez, told Recarey that when he was tasked with cleaning up the master bath after Epstein’s sessions with the girls, he often discovered sex toys. Once, he accidentally stumbled on a high school girl, whom he identified, sleeping naked in Epstein’s spa, he testified in a 2009 court deposition. Rodriguez said he was given the job of paying the girls, telling Recarey that he was “a human ATM machine’’ because he was ordered by Epstein to keep $2,000 on him at all times. He was also assigned to buy the girls gifts. Rodriguez gave Recarey copies of pages from a book that Epstein and his staff kept with the names and phone numbers for many of the Palm Beach County girls, Recarey said. Rodriguez, however, held onto the bulk of Epstein’s “little black book,’’ and in November 2009 tried to sell it for $50,000 to an undercover FBI agent posing as a victim’s lawyer. He was arrested and sentenced in 2012 to federal prison, and died three years later following an illness. The book — listing personal phone numbers for a cavalcade of Epstein’s powerful friends and celebrities — eventually became public as part of a civil lawsuit. It listed more than 100 female names and phone numbers under the headings “massage’’ in every city where Epstein had homes. In May 2006, Recarey drew up probable cause affidavits, charging Epstein, two of his assistants and one recruiter with sex-related crimes. Instead, Krischer took what Recarey said was the unusual step of referring the case to a state grand jury. Epstein was indicted in state court on a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution. Recarey said Krischer told him he didn’t believe Epstein’s accusers, and only two of them were called before the state grand jury investigating the case — even though police had lined up more than a dozen girls and witnesses at that time. Believing that the case had been tainted, Reiter — that same month, May 2006 — took a very public stance against Krischer, writing a letter, which was released to the news media, calling on Krischer to remove himself from the case. The chief then referred it to the FBI, which opened its own investigation in July 2006, FBI records show. Reiter said he was effectively blackballed in some Palm Beach circles as a result of going over Krischer’s head, and their relationship, once strong, would never be the same. Reiter has no regrets about what he did. “There are challenges here that don’t exist in a lot of other places because of the affluence in the community, but the only way I could approach this case was that none of that matters. The truth is still the truth. The facts are the facts. Everybody is treated the same.’’ In the years that followed, several of the victims obtained lawyers and filed civil lawsuits against Epstein. About two dozen lawsuits were filed, starting in 2008. The early cases were particularly brutal for his victims, the court records show. The girls faced fierce grilling from another pack of Epstein’s civil attorneys, who questioned them about their boyfriends, drinking, drug use, social media posts, their parents and even their medical histories. One girl was asked about her abortions, and her parents, who were Catholic and knew nothing about the abortions, were also deposed and questioned. Licata said the questions from Epstein’s civil lawyers were so intimate that she became paranoid that people were following her. “His lawyers were just in my life inside and out. They asked if I had a baby, if I had an abortion, ‘did you sleep with 30 different guys’ and ‘do you think that played a part?’ I said, ‘you’re going to come at me like that when you represent a guy who is doing this to hundreds of girls? How do you sleep at night?’ ” BROOKLYN TO PALM BEACH Jeffrey Epstein was born in Brooklyn, the son of a New York parks department worker. In one of several depositions he gave as part of the lawsuits filed against him, he said he attended the Cooper Union school for the advancement of science and art and then studied physics at New York University. But he never obtained a degree, instead going on to teach at the Dalton School, an elite K-12 private academy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Various news profiles over the years have speculated about how he made his vast fortune, calling him an “International Moneyman of Mystery’’ and “The Talented Mr. Epstein.’’ He then struck out on his own, opening J. Epstein & Co. His fortunes improved when he became a financial advisor for Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited stores and owner of Victoria’s Secret brands. Later, Epstein would boast that he would manage the portfolios of only those clients who had $1 billion or more.This much is known: He got his start on Wall Street after being offered a job by the father of one of his students. At Bear Stearns, he became a derivative specialist, applying complex math formulas and computer algorithms to evaluate financial data and trends. Through Wexner, he acquired a seven-story stone mansion that is considered the largest private residence in Manhattan — a 21,000-square-foot fortress with heated sidewalks that spans the entire block on 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. He also owns a 10,000-acre ranch, named “Zorro,’’ in New Mexico, a private island called “Little St. James’’ in the Virgin Islands, the $13 million house in Palm Beach, a Gulfstream jet and, at one point, owned a Boeing 727. Virginia Roberts says she was used as a sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein for years starting at the age of 16. Roberts says that Epstein also lent her out to some of his wealthy, powerful acquaintances for sex. Courtesy of Virginia Roberts He has never been in the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, largely because the magazine has never been able to determine the source or the size of his wealth. He has been dogged by questions about his financial dealings. A former business partner, Steven Hoffenberg, sued him in 2016, claiming that Epstein was the mastermind behind a $500 million Ponzi scheme that Hoffenberg was imprisoned for in 1995. Hoffenberg served 18 years for the scam, but he later dropped the lawsuit against Epstein. In August, two of Hoffenberg’s former investors rekindled the lawsuit against Epstein, but the case was dropped in October. Epstein and his associate, British-born socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, were also accused in a 2015 federal civil suit of organizing underage sex parties on his private plane, nicknamed “The Lolita Express,’’ and at Epstein’s various homes. Maxwell, who has never been charged with wrongdoing, has denied allegations made in the lawsuit that she was Epstein’s “madam.’’ The suit, filed by victim Virginia Roberts, was settled in 2017. It was Epstein’s contacts with powerful and famous people that first propelled him into the public spotlight. In 2002, he flew former President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Chris Tucker and others to South Africa on his private jet as part of a fact-finding AIDS mission in support of the Clinton Foundation. But Epstein, a Clinton donor who contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes, realized that his Democratic connections weren’t going to help him in 2006, when the federal prosecutor was Acosta, a conservative Republican appointed during the George W. Bush administration. ENTER KENNETH STARR Epstein’s tactic: hire the most aggressive and politically connected lawyers that his money could buy. At the top of his list: Kenneth Starr, a Republican icon because of his pursuit of Bill Clinton during the Whitewater investigation, which led to the impeachment (but not conviction) of the president after it was revealed he’d had sex with a young White House intern. Like Acosta, Starr had worked at the prestigious law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Epstein also tapped Jay Lefkowitz, also of Kirkland, who worked as a domestic policy advisor and later as a special envoy to North Korea during the George W. Bush presidency. Kenneth Starr, who as independent counsel built an impeachment case against President Bill Clinton for having sex with an intern, joined the legal team fighting to keep Epstein out of prison. ERIC GAY AP Epstein also hired Bruce Reinhart, then an assistant U.S. attorney in South Florida, now a U.S. magistrate. He left the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Jan. 1, 2008, and went to work representing Epstein’s employees on Jan. 2, 2008, court records show. In 2011, Reinhart was named in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit, which accused him of violating Justice Department policies by switching sides, implying that he leveraged inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein. Reinhart, in a sworn declaration attached to the CVRA case, denied the allegation, saying he did not participate in Epstein’s criminal case and “never learned any confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter.’’ The U.S. Attorney’s Office has since disputed that, saying in court papers that he did possess confidential information about the case. Contacted for this story, Reinhart, in an email, said he never represented Epstein — only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave. Reinhart also pointed out that a complaint filed against him by victims’ lawyer Paul Cassell was dismissed by the Justice Department. Bruce Reinhart left the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Jan. 1, 2008, and went to work representing Epstein’s employees on Jan. 2, 2008, court records show. PR NEWSWIRE That same year, 2011, more girls continued to come forward, including Roberts, who claimed in a British tabloid story that Epstein directed her — while she was underage by Florida standards — to have sex, not only with him, but with other powerful men, including his attorney, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew. Dershowitz and Andrew denied her claims, but after she filed a sworn affidavit in federal court in Miami, the ensuing news media firestorm forced Acosta, then dean of the law school at Florida International University, to explain why he’d declined to prosecute Epstein. In a written, public statement on March 20, 2011, Acosta asserted that the deal he struck with Epstein’s lawyers was harsher than it would have been had the case remained with the state prosecutor, Krischer, who favored charging Epstein with only a misdemeanor prostitution violation. Acosta also described what he called a “year-long assault’’ on prosecutors by Epstein’s “army of legal superstars’’ who, he said, investigated individual prosecutors and their families, looking for “personal peccadilloes’’ to disqualify them from Epstein’s case. Dershowitz, in an interview, denied that Epstein’s lawyers would ever investigate prosecutors. Documents nevertheless show that Acosta not only buckled under pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, but he and other prosecutors worked with them to contain the case, even as the FBI was uncovering evidence of victims and witnesses in other states, FBI and federal court documents show. A 53-page federal indictment had been prepared in 2007, and subpoenas were served on several of Epstein’s employees, compelling them to testify before a federal grand jury. The court records reveal that emails began to fly back and forth between prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team. Those emails show that federal prosecutors kept acquiescing to Epstein’s demands. Prosecutors allowed Epstein’s lawyers to dictate the terms of each deal that they drew up, and repeatedly backed down on deadlines, so that the defense essentially controlled the pace of the negotiations, the emails and letters show. It’s clear, from emails and other records, that prosecutors spent a lot of time figuring out a way to settle the case with the least amount of scandal. Instead of charging Epstein with a sex offense, prosecutors considered witness tampering and obstruction charges, and misdemeanors that would allow Epstein to secretly plead guilty in Miami instead of in Palm Beach County, where most of the victims lived, thereby limiting media exposure and making it less likely for victims to appear at the sentencing. “I’ve been spending some quality time with Title 18 [the U.S. criminal code] looking for misdemeanors,’’ the lead prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, wrote to Epstein’s lawyers on Sept. 13, 2007, adding that she was trying to find “a factual basis’’ for one or more non-sex-related crimes to charge him with. The email chain shows that prosecutors sometimes communicated with the defense team using private emails, and that their correspondence referenced discussions that they wanted to have by phone or in person, so that there would be no paper trail. “It’s highly unusual and raises suspicions of something unethical happening when you see emails that say ‘call me, I don’t want to put this in writing.’ There’s no reason to worry about putting something in writing if there’s nothing improper or unethical in the case,’’ said former federal prosecutor Francey Hakes, who worked in the Justice Department’s crimes against children unit. On Sept. 24, 2007, another agreement was reached (See update at end of story), but Epstein still wasn’t happy with it, emails show. Lefkowitz continued to pressure the U.S. Attorney’s Office to keep the agreement secret, even though under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, prosecutors were required to inform the victims that a plea deal had been signed. “We ... object to your sending a letter to the alleged victims,” Lefkowitz wrote on Nov. 28. “... Any such letter would immediately be leaked to the press, your actions will only have the effect of injuring Mr. Epstein and promoting spurious civil litigation directed at him. We also request that if your office believes that it must send a letter to go to the alleged victims ... it should happen only after Mr. Epstein has entered his plea.’’ By December, Epstein had still not agreed to a date for his plea hearing, and was technically in violation of the September agreement, which required him to appear in court by November, Acosta noted in a letter to Kenneth Starr in December 2007. “The [U.S. attorneys] who have been negotiating with defense counsel have for some time complained to me regarding the tactics used by the defense team,’’ Acosta wrote. “It appears to them that as soon as resolution is reached on one issue, defense counsel finds ways to challenge the resolution collaterally. ... Some in our office are deeply concerned that defense counsel will continue to mount collateral challenges to provisions to the agreement, even after Mr. Epstein has entered his guilty plea and thus rendered the agreement difficult, if not impossible, to unwind.’’ And that’s exactly what happened. Villafaña frequently showed her frustration. “I thought we had worked very well together in resolving this dispute. … I feel that I bent over backwards to keep in mind the effect that the agreement would have on Mr. Epstein,’’ Villafaña wrote to Epstein attorney Lefkowitz on Dec. 13, 2007. Marie Villafaña, the assistant U.S. attorney directly in charge of the Epstein case, frequently expressed frustration with the tactics of Epstein’s legal team. By then the deal had been signed for two months, and Jeffrey Sloman, Acosta’s top assistant, told Lefkowitz he intended to begin notifying Epstein’s victims. An indignant Lefkowitz wrote to Acosta, objecting strenuously, and reminding him of his earlier pledge not to have his staff contact the young women. As the months went on, with the agreement still in limbo, federal prosecutors once again began to prepare indictments against Epstein, court records show. The FBI investigation briefly resumed, and additional witnesses were interviewed in New York and New Mexico, the records show. In January 2008, several Epstein victims were sent letters informing them that the FBI investigation was “ongoing’’ as negotiations to finalize the plea bargain continued behind the scenes. Starr finally appealed to the Justice Department in Washington, challenging federal jurisdiction of the case, but in May 2008, the Justice Department affirmed Acosta’s right to prosecute. ‘STILL AFRAID OF EPSTEIN’ In recent court filings, the government was forced to answer questions about its negotiations, finally admitting in 2013 that federal prosecutors had backed down under relentless pressure by Epstein’s attorneys. “The government admits that, at least in part as a result of objections lodged by Epstein’s lawyers to victim notifications, the [United States Attorney’s Office] reevaluated its obligations to provide notification to victims and Jane Doe #1 was thus not told that the USAO had entered into a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein until after it was signed,’’ wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Dexter Lee. Said Hakes, the former federal prosecutor: “I have never heard of a case where federal prosecutors consult with a defense attorney before they send out standard victim notification letters. To negotiate what the letters would say and whether they would be sent at all suggest that the victims’ rights were violated multiple times.’’ Starr’s aggressive advocacy for Epstein against allegations of improper sexual behavior was in stark contrast to the path he took investigating then-President Clinton. The Starr Report, the summary of his findings in the Whitewater investigation, which started as a probe of a land deal gone sour and veered into an investigation of sexual misconduct, savaged the president for his involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and was the basis for impeachment. Starr himself would face criticism in 2016 — he stepped down as president of Baylor University amid allegations that he and other university officials mishandled sexual assault allegations brought by female students against members of the school’s football team. The Herald reached out to Starr, through certified letter and through a spokesman for his current law firm, the Lanier Firm, but did not receive a response for this story. Palm Beach police detective Recarey, one of the most highly decorated officers on the Palm Beach Police Department, called the Epstein case the most troubling of his 23-year career. “Some of the victims were — and still are — afraid of Epstein,’’ he said as part of a series of interviews with the Herald earlier this year. Privately, Reiter and Recarey said, they held onto a hope that Epstein would be brought to trial someday, but they said that that notion had faded. “I always hoped that the plea would be thrown out and that these teenage girls, who were labeled as prostitutes by prosecutors, would get to finally shed that label and see him go to prison where he belongs,’’ Recarey said. Recarey died in May after a brief illness. He was 50 years old. This story has been corrected to remove a quotation from Jay Lefkowitz, Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney, that was presented out of sequence. ---- Update: At a news conference on July 9, 2019, announcing his resignation as labor secretary over the Epstein matter, Alexander Acosta defended his handling of the case, noting that Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement had been signed on Sept. 24, 2007, and that there were no changes and no outstanding issues to discuss at his October meeting at the Palm Beach Marriott with Epstein attorney Jay Lefkowitz. Letters show this was not the case. On Oct. 10, 2007, two days before the Oct. 12 meeting, Lefkowitz wrote an eight-page letter to Acosta, labeled as “confidential, for settlement purposes” and citing “serious disagreements.” In it, Lefkowitz outlined a number of what he called “open issues.’‘ Among the issues he listed was victim notification, which he said would violate the agreement that was signed, an addendum to the agreement involving civil restitution and a liability waiver. “Alex, as you know, when Mr. Epstein signed the Agreement, he did so in order to reach finality with your office and with the express representation that the federal investigation against him would cease. To that end, I would like your assurance that after you and I agree to the issues raised in this letter, that will be the end of the United States’ involvement barring a willful breech of the agreement. Specifically, the Government or any of its agents will not make any further communications to the identified individuals,’‘ which referred to the victims. He wrote: “I look forward to resolving these open issues with you.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... rylink=cpy

[admin]

Part Three

Even from jail, sex abuser manipulated the system. His victims were kept in the dark
BY JULIE K. BROWN
NOV. 28, 2018
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 94920.html

A decade before #MeToo, a multimillionaire sex offender from Florida got the ultimate break.

Palm Beach County Courthouse
June 30, 2008

Jeffrey Edward Epstein appeared at his sentencing dressed comfortably in a blue blazer, blue shirt, jeans and gray sneakers. His attorney, Jack Goldberger, was at his side.

At the end of the 68-minute hearing, the 55-year-old silver-haired financier — accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls — was fingerprinted and handcuffed, just like any other criminal sentenced in Florida.

But inmate No. W35755 would not be treated like other convicted sex offenders in the state of Florida, which has some of the strictest sex offender laws in the nation.

Ten years before the #MeToo movement raised awareness about the kid-glove handling of powerful men accused of sexual abuse, Epstein’s lenient sentence and his extraordinary treatment while in custody are still the source of consternation for the victims he was accused of molesting when they were minors.

Beginning as far back as 2001, Epstein lured a steady stream of underage girls to his Palm Beach mansion to engage in nude massages, masturbation, oral sex and intercourse, court and police records show. The girls — mostly from disadvantaged, troubled families — were recruited from middle and high schools around Palm Beach County. Epstein would pay the girls for massages and offer them further money to bring him new girls every time he was at his home in Palm Beach, according to police reports.

The girls, now in their late 20s and early 30s, allege in a series of federal civil lawsuits filed over the past decade that Epstein sexually abused hundreds of girls, not only in Palm Beach, but at his homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and in the Caribbean.

In 2007, the FBI had prepared a 53-page federal indictment charging Epstein with sex crimes that could have put him in federal prison for life. But then-Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta signed off on a non-prosecution agreement, which was negotiated, signed and sealed so that no one would know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes. The indictment was shelved, never to be seen again.

Epstein instead pleaded guilty to lesser charges in state court, and was required to register as a sex offender. He was sentenced to 18 months incarceration. But Epstein — who had a long list of powerful, politically connected friends — didn’t go to state prison like most sex offenders in Florida. Instead, the multimillionaire was assigned to a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade, where he was able to hire his own security detail. Even then, he didn’t spend much time in a cell. He was allowed to go to his downtown West Palm Beach office for work release, up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, records show.

Sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein was surrounded by powerful people. Here’s a sampling
November 28, 2018
8:00 AM

He was permitted to hire his own private psychologist for his required sex-offender counseling, and after his release from jail, his subsequent year of probation under house arrest was filled with trips on his corporate jet to Manhattan and to his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands — all approved by the courts with no objections from the state.

On the morning of his sentencing in 2008, none of Epstein’s victims were in the courtroom to protest his soft jail term or the unusual provisions of his incarceration and probation — and that was by design.

Emails and letters contained in court filings reveal the cozy, behind-the-scenes dealings between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s indomitable legal team during the run-up to his federal plea deal, as they discussed ways to minimize his criminal charges and avoid informing the girls about the details of the deal until after the case was resolved.

That arrangement benefited Epstein in a number of ways. Unlike other high-profile sex crime cases, federal prosecutors agreed to keep his sentencing quiet, thereby limiting media coverage. His underage victims — identified in FBI documents — weren’t told about the plea deal so they weren’t in court, where they could voice their objections and possibly sway the judge to give Epstein a harsher sentence or reject the agreement altogether.

Most important, Epstein’s crimes would be reduced to felony prostitution charges, giving him the ability to argue that the girls weren’t victims at all — they were prostitutes.

Four accomplices named in Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement — Nadia Marcinkova, Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross and Lesley Groff — were also given immunity from federal prosecution. Marcinkova was a young girl when Epstein brought her from Yugoslavia to live with him. Several victims told police that she was involved in orgies with Epstein and underage girls. Ross, Groff and Kellen, now known by her married name, Vickers, were schedulers who arranged his underage sex sessions, according to the FBI and police.

Marcinkova and Kellen, through their attorneys, declined to comment for this story. The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Ross and Groff.

Acosta, who is now President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, told lawmakers last year at his confirmation hearing that he did not know that Epstein would receive such liberal treatment while incarcerated. But court records show that federal prosecutors under his authority acquiesced to many of Epstein’s demands, including that he not go to federal or state prison.

“I can’t remember how I found out that he had taken a plea,’’ said Courtney Wild, identified by the FBI as one of more than three dozen underage girls — some of them as young as 13 — who had been molested by Epstein at his waterfront estate between 2001 and 2005.

“We were purposefully misled into believing that his sentencing [in state court] had nothing to do with the federal crimes he committed against me or the other girls.’’

Epstein, now 65, was released in 2009 after serving 13 months.

Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein, is suing the federal government, alleging that prosecutors kept her and other victims in the dark as part of a conspiracy to give Epstein — described in the lawsuit as “a powerful, politically connected multimillionaire” — one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history.

[X]
Courtney Wild, 30, was a victim of serial sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein beginning at the age of 14. Epstein paid Wild, and many other underage girls, to give him massages, often having them undress and perform sexual acts. Epstein also used the girls as recruiters, paying them to bring him other underage girls. Emily Michot [email protected]

Now 31, Wild is Jane Doe No. 1 in “Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 vs. the United States,” which seeks to overturn Epstein’s plea agreement on the grounds that it was executed in violation of the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The measure affords crime victims a series of rights, including to confer with prosecutors and to be notified about plea negotiations and sentencing.

That lawsuit — and an unrelated state court case scheduled for trial on Dec. 4 — could expose more about Epstein’s crimes, as well as who else was involved and whether there was any undue influence that tainted the federal case.

Some of Epstein’s victims will finally have an opportunity to testify for the first time as part of the Dec. 4 case in state court in Palm Beach County. It pits Fort Lauderdale attorney Bradley Edwards against Epstein, who had accused Edwards of malfeasance in his representation of several victims.

Jack Scarola, the attorney representing Edwards, said Epstein should be held accountable for his unrelenting attacks against Edwards — as well as others who were involved in his case.

“We are going to demonstrate through this case that no one — no matter how much money they have — can abuse children and then attempt to bully those who come to the defense of children,’’ said Scarola, a former state prosecutor.

FLORIDA AND BEYOND

Few people had as much insight into Epstein’s lifestyle — and its international reach — as Virginia Roberts. By age 16, Roberts had lived a life that was beyond that of most high school girls.

At 11, she says, she was sexually molested by a family friend. At 12, she was smoking pot and skipping school. At 13, she was in and out of foster homes, and at 14, she was on the street.

In Miami, the runaway became a captive of a 65-year-old sex trafficker, Ron Eppinger. For months, she says, she was sexually abused, kept in an apartment and pimped out to pedophiles. After his indictment in 2000 on trafficking charges, Roberts returned to West Palm Beach and tried to heal.

[X]
Virginia Roberts says she was used as a sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein for years starting at the age of 16. Roberts says that Epstein also lent her out to some of his wealthy, powerful acquaintances for sex. Courtesy of Virginia Roberts

That summer, when Roberts was 16, she said her father helped her get a job as a locker room attendant at the spa at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, records show. Her father worked at the resort as a maintenance man.

There she said she met Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein friend and socialite daughter of the late British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. She offered Roberts an opportunity to become a massage therapist, working for Epstein.

In a sworn court affidavit and in a recent interview with the Herald, Roberts described how Epstein and Maxwell began grooming her — not just to perform massages, but to sexually pleasure them and others.

“It started with one and it trickled into two and so on,’’ Roberts told the Herald. “And before you know it, I’m being lent out to politicians and academics and royalty.’’

Roberts, too, was ordered to find Epstein girls — the younger, the better — by trolling areas where teenagers congregated, such as shopping malls, to lure girls to whatever residence Epstein was staying in at the time, she told the Herald.

She began to travel with Epstein and Maxwell to Epstein’s other homes, in New York, New Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands — and her trips are documented in flight logs that frequently list her name or her initials as a passenger, court records show. “

His appetite was insatiable. He wanted new girls, fresh, young faces every single day — that was just the sickness that he had,’’ Roberts said.

Neither Epstein nor his lead attorney, Goldberger, responded to requests for comment.

Roberts alleges that Epstein had cameras throughout his homes and said he liked her to tell him about the sexual peccadilloes of various important men she had sex with.

“Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him,’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’ and he would ‘have something on them,’ ” Roberts said in a court affidavit. “I understood him to mean that when someone was in his pocket, they owed him favors.’’

Roberts elaborated in her interview with the Herald, saying that Epstein had access to girls through a modeling agency that recruited them from overseas.

Epstein, who was close to Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, often talked about his connections to people in the modeling, fashion and acting industries, Roberts told the Herald.

“He [Epstein] would tell the girls, ‘Hey, I will give you a modeling contract if you go have sex with this man [whichever acquaintance Epstein designated],’ ’’ she said.

Roberts’ story about the modeling agency is supported, to a degree, by the sworn statement of a Miami woman named Maritza Vasquez, who was later interviewed in New York by an FBI agent from Miami. Vasquez worked as a bookkeeper for Mc2, owned by Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel. He employed scouts in South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union to find him models to bring to the United States, Vasquez said in a 2010 sworn court deposition obtained by the Herald.

Vasquez stated in the deposition that from 2003 to 2006 she handled all the finances and payroll for the agency, including a bank transaction involving Epstein. She said Epstein invested $1 million in Mc2.

The models were often very young — 13, 14 and 15 — and some of them were housed in apartments at 301 E. 66th St. in New York, a building purportedly owned by Epstein, the deposition said.

Epstein didn’t charge the girls rent, Vasquez said, but Brunel charged them $1,000 a month, with four of them at a time sharing one apartment. The girls who were the youngest and most beautiful stayed at the 66th Street apartments, which were more luxurious than the other apartments that were used to house models who were not as young and desirable, she said.

Vasquez once let one of the models, who was 14, stay overnight with her after the girl ran into trouble with police for trying to get into a Manhattan nightclub. Vasquez also testified that she helped a lawyer obtain visas for the foreign models, and assisted with their transportation to and from modeling assignments and parties.

Vasquez said that even though the agency employed 200 to 300 models, the company didn’t make any money and Brunel was always broke. Brunel would later sue Epstein, alleging that the financier’s sex scandal had caused his business to fail, but the suit was eventually dropped.

Vasquez testified it wasn’t unusual for the agency to send girls to an assignment with a wealthy client for $100,000 or more, but the girl wouldn’t be paid the full amount — or anything at all — if she refused to be “molested.’’

Vasquez considered herself a mother figure and often coached the youngest girls to stick to the 9-to-5 modeling assignments because she didn’t think it was appropriate for them to be having sex.

She said she met Epstein only once, but she often helped arrange for girls — many of them underage — to be sent to his homes in New York, Palm Beach and his island in the Caribbean for parties. She heard salacious rumors about Epstein’s parties, but testified she had no firsthand knowledge about whether they involved sex.

Vasquez said that she was questioned by the FBI and she tried to tell agents where to look for evidence.

Vasquez was eventually let go from the agency after she was accused of stealing money — money she claims was given to her by Brunel. Vasquez said she was placed on probation for the theft. She never heard from the FBI about Epstein again.

The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Brunel through his former attorney.

In a written statement released in 2015, Brunel denied any involvement in trafficking underage models.

“I strongly deny having participated, neither directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of,” he said. “I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager.”

TOO OLD AT 19

In 2003, when Roberts turned 19, it was clear that Epstein had lost interest because she was too old for him, she said. She convinced him to pay for her to get training to become a real professional masseuse so that she could move on.

In an interview, she explained that Epstein arranged for her to take a class in Thailand, but it came with a hitch: She said she was instructed to pick up a Thai girl he had arranged to come to the States.

Roberts, who showed the Herald the written instructions for the rendezvous, never picked up the girl because Roberts met a man on the trip who would become her husband. The couple married and moved to Australia, where they currently live.

In 2007 — at the same time the FBI was investigating Epstein — Roberts, pregnant with her second child, said she unexpectedly received phone calls from Maxwell and Epstein. She said they were worried that she had told police about them. She assured them she had not spoken to anyone, she said.

Shortly afterward, Roberts said, she was contacted by someone who claimed to be with the FBI. But she was afraid to tell that person details, fearing it was really an Epstein associate posing as an FBI agent.

That agent, identified in court papers as Timothy Slater, confirmed that he and the other agent on the case, Nesbitt Kuyrkendall, called Roberts in January or February 2007. In a sworn statement, Slater said he informed Roberts that they suspected she was a victim of Epstein’s.

The agent said Roberts answered basic questions, but became uncomfortable and “asked that I not bother her again.’’

Roberts said the agent didn’t try too hard to convince her to talk, and she was surprised when he hung up after asking her a few graphic questions about her sex life. She said she was suspicious, but would have cooperated had the FBI talked to her in person and explained why they were asking about Epstein.

“I was still scared to death,’’ Roberts said. “Jeffrey used to tell me that he owned the entire Palm Beach Police Department. I just didn’t want my family harmed.’’

She nevertheless was listed by federal prosecutors as one of Epstein’s Palm Beach victims.

As the years went by and Roberts had a daughter, she would be haunted by a fear that Epstein was still taking advantage of young girls. In 2011, she went public in a paid interview with a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, asserting that she had had sex with Prince Andrew, one of Epstein’s friends, several times when she was a teen.

In her 2015 affidavit, she discussed in detail some of her alleged sex encounters with the prince and Epstein’s other friends, including lawyer Alan Dershowitz. Edwards included the affidavit in the court file as part of the Jane Does’ Crime Victims’ Rights Act case, at which time it became public.

[X]
Virginia Roberts poses for a photo with Prince Andrew. Roberts reports that she was lent out to Prince Andrew when she was a teenage sex slave for Palm Beach millionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Roberts says she was used as a sex slave for Jeffrey Epstein for years starting at the age of 16. Roberts says that Epstein regularly lent her out to some of his wealthy, powerful acquaintances for sex. Courtesy of Virginia Roberts

In the affidavit, Roberts claimed that Epstein and Maxwell directed her to have sex with Andrew and Dershowitz and others. She had sex with Andrew three times, she alleged — once in London, when she was 17, again in New York, when she was 17, and a third time, as part of an orgy on Epstein’s island, when she was 18. By law, at 17, she would have been above the age of consent in New York and England, but not in Florida, where the age of consent is 18.

As part of the affidavit, Roberts furnished a photograph of her with the prince and Maxwell, which she said was taken in London.

Dershowitz, who was part of Epstein’s criminal defense team, was often a guest at Epstein’s homes, she said.

“I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times,’’ Roberts wrote in the 2015 court affidavit. “The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein and it continued until I was 19.’’ She detailed some of those alleged trysts, which she said happened at Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach, New Mexico and on Epstein’s island.

One of Epstein’s housemen, Juan Alessi, testified in a 2009 sworn deposition that Dershowitz visited Epstein’s Palm Beach home four or five times a year. He said that Roberts was a frequent visitor as well, but he never placed Dershowitz and Roberts at the house at the same time.

Alessi, who testified he worked for Epstein from 1999 to 2002, said there were often young girls who gave massages at the house, even in the middle of the night. But he said he never checked their ages, and only knew one girl for certain who was underage, because he had picked her up from high school. That girl, who is now an actress, was not one of Epstein’s masseuses, Alessi said.

He also said he was Maxwell’s driver, and he recalls waiting outside of Mar-a-Lago the day Maxwell met Roberts. He testified he saw Maxwell talking to Roberts and recalls Roberts coming to Epstein’s mansion later that day. One of Alessi’s jobs was to drive Maxwell to various spas in Palm Beach where she left business cards in order to “recruit’’ more masseuses, he said in the sworn deposition.

Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and Maxwell have long denied Roberts’ allegations.

In an interview with the Herald, Dershowitz reiterated that he had never met Roberts, and never saw Epstein with any underage girls.

“The story was 100 percent flatly categorically made-up,’’ he said, adding that Roberts and her attorneys fabricated the assertion in order to get money from other powerful, wealthy people she alleges she had sex with.

“The only possible reason to accuse me in public and [them] in private is so she could get money,’’ Dershowitz said.

Edwards and his co-counsel in the Crime Victims’ lawsuit, University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell, sued Dershowitz for defamation and Dershowitz countersued in 2015. The case was settled out of court, with Dershowitz saying he had been vindicated.

Dershowitz said he received a massage at Epstein’s Palm Beach home only once — but that it was just a regular, therapeutic massage by a masseuse — not by Roberts or anyone underage. Dershowitz’s wife was there at Epstein’s house at the time, Dershowitz said in the deposition taken for the case in 2015.

“I never had any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein having any contact with any underage women — ever,’’ Dershowitz told the Herald.

Edwards and Cassell admitted making a “tactical mistake” in filing the accusations against Dershowitz as part of a lawsuit not involving him. But they emphasized that the settlement had no bearing on the veracity of Roberts’ allegations.

The judge for the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit agreed that the affidavit was misplaced in that case, and it was dropped.

Prince Andrew’s spokesman at Buckingham Palace did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Roberts, now 35, said it has taken her a long time to stand up to Epstein. She and 20 other victims received settlements from Epstein, ranging from $50,000 to more than $1 million. The exact amounts have been kept confidential.

“It takes so long until you are able to speak about it. It took me having a daughter and looking at this young, beautiful innocent baby to say I want to speak out about it now. I’m hoping that this will bring out more girls so that they say, Me Too.’’

THE STATE COURT HEARING

The judge at Epstein’s sentencing hearing at the Palm Beach County Courthouse knew very little about Epstein’s crimes. The sentencing paperwork was restricted to Epstein’s specific charges: one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution.

“Are there more than one victim?’’ Circuit Court Judge Deborah Dale Pucillo asked the prosecutor at Epstein’s sentencing on June 30, 2008.

“There’s several,’’ replied assistant state prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek.

“Are all the victims in both of these cases in agreement with the terms of this plea?’‘ Pucillo later asked.

“Yes,’‘ Belohlavek replied, telling the judge that she had spoken to “several” of Epstein’s victims.

Emails show that federal prosecutors didn’t want the judge to know how many victims and accomplices there were.

Federal prosecutor A. Marie Villafaña — in a September 2007 email to Epstein lawyer Jay Lefkowitz — said: “I will mention co-conspirators but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all the other crimes and all the other persons that we could charge.’’

Attorney Spencer Kuvin happened to be in court that day because he’d heard Epstein was to appear, but Kuvin didn’t know why. He figured he’d use it as an opportunity to serve Epstein with civil court papers involving one of several victims he represented. Instead, he listened to what was happening and couldn’t believe that no one had contacted him or his clients.

“I was shocked to learn that the proceeding involved my client’s case and there was nothing I could do except watch as they disposed of her case without ever telling her,’’ Kuvin said.

At the hearing, Belohlavek and Epstein’s attorney, Goldberger, were in sync, the court transcript shows. Epstein would be required to register as a sex offender, but his probation would not be served under the strict requirements of sex offender probation.

[X]
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14. Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He served 13 months at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office Stockade Facility, much of the time outside of the gates on ‘work release.’ Emily Michot [email protected]

The judge didn’t question those provisions, but she did ask why Epstein was going to serve his sentence in the Palm Beach County stockade instead of in a Florida state prison, like most sex offenders.

[X]
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14. Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served 13 months at the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office Stockade, much of the time outside of the gates on ‘work release.’ Emily Michot [email protected]

“We just decided that was the best way to accomplish what needed to be done here and the parties agreed that that sentence satisfied everyone’s requirements,’’ Goldberger replied.

Said Judge Pucillo: “The taxpayers of Palm Beach County are going to pay 18 months to house this guy instead of DOC [the Department of Corrections]?”

Belohlavek: “Right.’’

Pucillo did not respond to a request for comment on the case.

Villafaña, the lead federal prosecutor in Epstein’s case, was in the courtroom, but there’s no indication she objected to Epstein’s cozier jail accommodations.

When he entered jail in July 2008, Epstein was arguably the most well-known inmate there. Records also show that Epstein hired Palm Beach sheriff’s deputies for his security details, paying them for the hours they spent monitoring him on work release at his West Palm Beach office, where he often stayed until 10 p.m., jail logs show.

The Herald reviewed their time sheets, showing that the deputies logged visitors coming and going to and from his office throughout the day. A record log of his visitors was kept in a safe, but the log no longer exists, according to a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

One deputy who often worked Epstein’s detail said that his assignment was to stay in a front reception room of Epstein’s office. Epstein was in a separate office — with the door closed — most of the day as he accepted visitors, both male and female, the deputies’ logs show.

[x]
An office inside of One Clearlake Centre, at 250 Australian Ave. is one of the known locations where Jeffrey Epstein was permitted to go during work release while serving his sentence at the Palm Beach County stockade. Emily Michot [email protected]

“It was not our job to monitor what he was doing in that office,’’ the deputy, now retired, told the Herald.

In their early reports in July 2008, the deputies referred to Epstein as “inmate’’ but within a few weeks the language had changed and he was called a “client.” He was occasionally allowed to take a break for lunch by sitting outside in a park, the records show, and they also gave him permission to scout for a new office. While on work release, he was required to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor his whereabouts.

The work release was approved by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, said spokeswoman Therese Barbera.

“Jeffrey Epstein, while in custody, met the criteria for the Work Release Program,’’ Barbera wrote in an email. “There was no factual basis to deny Mr. Epstein the same availability of this program that is offered to other inmates under similar circumstances. Mr. Epstein was closely monitored and there were no problems encountered during his time in the program.”

But the sheriff’s own work release policy — a copy of which Barbera provided to the Herald — specifically notes that sex offenders aren’t eligible for work release.

At first, Barbera questioned whether Epstein was a sex offender at all, noting that he didn’t have to register officially until after his release from the jail in 2009. But his court papers clearly listed him as a sex offender. In fact, the papers Epstein signed — obtained by the Herald — included all the laws governing registered sex offenders in Florida.

Barbera refused to explain why Epstein was seemingly allowed to deviate from the agency’s policies. She also would not respond to requests for an accounting of the amount of money that Epstein paid the sheriff’s office for his private details.

Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who has been in office since 2004 — and is widely considered to be one of the most powerful people in the county — did not respond to requests for comment.

[x]
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw was ultimately responsible for approving Jeffrey Epstein’s work-release arrangement. Taylor Jones Palm Beach Post

Epstein’s registration requirements are somewhat confusing, even to those who are responsible for keeping his registration. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which keeps the online registry, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, where Epstein has to register in person twice a year, gave conflicting explanations over the past six months about who is responsible for ensuring that he is complying with the law.

On Nov. 14, the Herald asked the sheriff’s office for a full accounting of Epstein’s check-ins for 2018. The record the office supplied two days later showed he registered in January and in July — as required. But PBSO also inexplicably had him registering on Nov. 14 — the very same day that the Herald asked for the records from the sheriff’s office.

When asked about this sudden registration, Barbera replied: “The information we provided you was a snapshot from the FDLE website. Perhaps, someone from FDLE can provide a reason for you.’’

Said FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger in an email: “The screenshot is not on the public registry. This is information inputted by the local agency when the offender comes into the local sheriff’s office to register.’’

Plessinger said Epstein is not covered by the state’s new three-day rule, which requires sex offenders to re-register when they come to stay in Florida for three days or more. His town of Palm Beach home is already on file, as a temporary residence, she said.

So it’s not clear why he would have suddenly registered a third time on Nov. 14.

State Sen. Lauren Book, a child sex abuse survivor and vocal advocate for tough sex offender monitoring, called the case an appalling example of how those in the justice system allow wealthy people to skirt the law and bend the rules.

“These prosecutors, and judges and sheriffs who are making these decisions and allowing things to fly — we have to hold these people accountable. They are supposed to uphold the law — regardless of who a person is and how much money they have in the bank or who they had on their airplane.’’

PIECE BY PIECE

Over the years, Courtney Wild, Virginia Roberts and more than a dozen other women who say they were victims of Epstein have been quietly challenging the traditional legal norms that have failed to punish Epstein and other men in positions of power for sexual abuse.

Epstein has paid millions of dollars in civil compensation that, for the most part, has kept the details about his operation out of the public eye. As a result, much — but not all — of the testimony and evidence collected as part of the vast litigation has been sealed or redacted from public court records.

Taking a page from Epstein’s legal team, lawyers representing Epstein’s victims hired private investigators and former police detectives to dig into Epstein’s life. Over the past decade, they’ve tracked down hundreds of people, including dozens of other potential victims; they’ve interviewed Epstein’s recruiters, bookkeepers, housekeepers, butlers, pilots and drivers. They’ve traveled around the country and the world, taking statements and sworn depositions, coaxing people to talk who had previously been too reticent to come forward.

In short, they did what criminal prosecutors didn’t do.

Some of the information they’ve learned was given to federal authorities in New York. Edwards said those authorities have shown no interest in opening a new investigation focused on crimes he is alleged to have committed in that state, where he is listed as a level 3 sex offender, the most dangerous category, considered at risk to re-offend, records show. In New York, he has to register every 90 days.

[x]
Virginia Roberts holds a photo of herself at age 16, when she was being sexually abused by Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Roberts was employed by Epstein for massage and sex at his Palm Beach and New York homes as well as traveling with him on his private plane to his private island where he pimped her out for sex with his friends. Emily Michot [email protected]

HOLDING ABUSERS ACCOUNTABLE

In 2015, Roberts sued Maxwell for defamation in New York after Maxwell called her a liar in a news interview. The civil lawsuit was an effort by Roberts not just to clear her name, but an attempt to prove that Epstein and Maxwell operated an international underage sex trafficking operation. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2017 and nearly all the evidence presented in the case has been sealed.

Roberts’ attorney, Sigrid McCawley, claims that Roberts received a sizable settlement, although the amount is confidential.

“She wanted to hold her abusers accountable and we were able to do that by bringing this case … which we ultimately settled very successfully for her,’’ said McCawley, an associate of noted Bush-Gore recount lawyer David Boies, who has also pursued cases against Epstein in federal court in New York.

Maxwell’s lawyer, Laura Menninger, declined to comment, referring the Herald to the court history.

“[Roberts] fabricated a story of abuse at the hands of Ms. Maxwell in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars from British tabloids with a motive for selling papers and advertisements and without regard for truth, veracity or substantiation,’’ Menninger noted in a 2016 response filed in the case.

In February, the Miami Herald filed a federal court motion in the Southern District of New York, seeking access to documents that were sealed in the Maxwell case. The motion, which was not opposed by Roberts, could have cast light on the full scope of Epstein’s possible sex trafficking operation, who was involved and whether it was covered up. Maxwell has opposed the Herald’s motion, which was denied in August.

The Herald is appealing.

Today, Epstein has a new private jet, which takes him around the world. Flight records show that he spends most of his time on his private island, Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which he now lists as his permanent residence. He is registered in New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands as a sex offender. New Mexico, where he owns a sprawling ranch, does not list him as a convicted sex offender.

As part of its investigation, the Herald learned that in 2013, the federal government conceded that it had given Epstein what it called “valuable consideration” for information he provided to the FBI as part of his plea deal. The documents do not elaborate, but Epstein — a hedge fund manager who once worked for the investment firm Bear Stearns — was listed as a key investor who lost money in the financial crash of 2008.

Francey Hakes, a former federal child sex crimes prosecutor, said any consideration the government gave to Epstein should be made public.

“The public has a right to know why he got a slap on the wrist, and what was the interest that was so great that allowed him to not get prosecuted?”

[x]
Nadia Marcinkova, now a professional pilot, worked for Jeffrey Epstein when he was molesting young women. Victims told police Marcinkova would participate in sex acts, often as Epstein choreographed every move. Jerod Harris

In recent years, Epstein has been traveling the world in his new Gulfstream V jet. He has been active in various charitable causes and scientific research projects. The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, based in the U.S. Virgin Islands, has helped fund NeuroTV, an online network that features interviews with academics and scientists.

THEN AND NOW

Both Nadia Marcinkova and Sarah Kellen changed their names after the scandal.

Marcinkova, 32, briefly became Marcinko. She visited Epstein more than 70 times when he was in Palm Beach custody. She went on to a career in real estate. And she is now an FAA-certified commercial pilot and flight instructor who goes by the name “Global Girl’’ on social media. (http://www.facebook.com/GlobalGirlAviation/)

Sarah Kellen, who used the name Kensington for a while, is now married to NASCAR driver Brian Vickers. The couple divides their time between homes in North Carolina, New York and Miami Beach.

[x]
NASCAR driver Brian Vickers and his wife, Sarah, take part in pre-race ceremonies in Sparta, Ky., on June 28, 2014. She was known as Sarah Kellen when she was an aide to Jeffrey Epstein. According to police, she scheduled visits of underage girls to Epstein’s Palm Beach estate for massages that turned sexual. She was not charged with a crime. Will Schneekloth Getty Images

Maxwell, 56, transformed herself into an internationally known environmentalist. In 2012, she founded the TerraMar Project, a nonprofit environmental group that works to protect the world’s oceans. In 2013, she gave a TED Talk on ocean conservation, discussing her diving expeditions around the world.

[x]
Guislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s close associate when he was inviting underage girls into his bedroom, leads a Ted Talk on environmental issues.

Dershowitz, 80, continues to lecture around the country. A professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, Dershowitz has been a frequent commenter on cable TV programs, often defending President Trump.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, 58, remained friends with Epstein, and in 2010, a photograph was taken of the two of them strolling in Manhattan. It was later revealed that Epstein had loaned the prince’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, $24,000 to pay off some debts. Ferguson later called the loan a “gigantic error of judgment.”

PLAIN HUMAN BEINGS

Crime victims’ rights advocates have used the Epstein case to strengthen the federal law in recent years, adding more precise language mandating that prosecutors notify victims about plea bargains and allow victims to be heard at sentencing.

Because some statute-of-limitation laws set deadlines for filing civil and criminal sex crime cases, it’s difficult to bring them years later, said Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who is working to ease those restrictions across the country.

But she points out that there has been no statute of limitations for federal sex crimes involving children since 2002.

Children who are sexually abused often take decades to reveal what happened to them, in part because their brains aren’t wired at a young age to understand the trauma they’ve experienced, said Kenneth V. Lanning, a retired FBI agent who investigated and studied child sex crimes for 40 years.

“We want to hold children to some superhuman standard because they behave this way. In reality, police, prosecutors and judges have to understand that children are not all angels from heaven. They are just plain human beings who are emotionally immature so we have to protect them from their own decisions.’’

Wild, who continues to fight her federal case on behalf of all of Epstein’s victims, said she hopes that the federal judge hearing the Crime Victims’ Rights case will make a ruling soon, one that will send a message to prosecutors who fail to consider the rights of crime victims.

“Really if you think about this too hard, it’s scary because this is our government that is supposed to protect us but has done everything to protect a pedophile,’’ she said. More from the series

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... rylink=cpy

[admin]

He was over 50. They were little girls. Their stories were almost identical. The evidence was substantial.
BY JULIE K. BROWN AND AARON ALBRIGHT
NOV. 28, 2018
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 97990.html

Jeffrey Epstein had a little black book filled with the names and personal phone numbers of some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people, from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to actors, actresses, scientists and business tycoons. A money manager for the super-rich, Epstein had two private jets, the largest single residence in Manhattan, an island in the Caribbean, a ranch in New Mexico and a waterfront estate in Florida. But Epstein also had an obsession. For years, Epstein lured an endless stream of teenage girls to his Palm Beach mansion, offering to pay them for massages. Instead, police say, for years he coerced middle and high school girls into engaging in sex acts with him and others. As evidence emerged that there were victims and witnesses outside of Palm Beach, the FBI began an investigation in 2006 into whether Epstein and others employed by him were involved in underage sex trafficking. But in 2007, despite substantial evidence that corroborated the girls’ stories of abuse by Epstein, the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a secret deal for the multimillionaire, one that ensured he would never spend a day in prison. Acosta, now President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, agreed to seal the agreement so that no one — not even Epstein’s victims — would know the full extent of his crimes or who was involved. This is the story of that deal — and how his victims, more than a decade later, are still fighting a criminal justice system that has stubbornly failed to hold wealthy, powerful men accountable for sexual abuse.

[admin]

For years, Jeffrey Epstein abused teen girls, police say. A timeline of his case
BY JULIE K. BROWN
NOV. 28, 2018
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... 04845.html

A decade before #MeToo, a multimillionaire sex offender from Florida got the ultimate break. 2005 March: A 14-year-old girl and her parents report that Jeffrey Epstein molested her at a mansion in Palm Beach. She said a female acquaintance and classmate at Royal Palm Beach High School had taken her to the house to give him a massage in exchange for money. Jeffrey Epstein’s waterfront Palm Beach home in on El Brillo Way off of A1A. In addition to his Palm Beach home, Epstein owns a residence in New York City and on a private island in the U.S Virgin. Islands. Epstein has been accused of molesting scores of young girls in his homes. Emily Michot [email protected] April: Palm Beach police begin trash pulls at Epstein’s home, discovering a telephone message for Epstein with the girl’s name on it, and a time that matched the time that she told police she was there. They find the names and phone numbers of other girls on message slips in his trash. October: With the police probe in full swing, one of Epstein’s assistants calls one of the girls just as she is being questioned by police. Investigators begin interviewing more girls, as well as Epstein’s butlers, who tell them that Epstein had frequent visits from girls throughout the day. On Oct. 20, they execute a search warrant at his house on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach. 2006 May: Police sign a probable cause affidavit charging Epstein and two of his assistants with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. The Palm Beach state attorney, Barry Krischer, instead refers the case to a grand jury. Palm Beach police were unhappy with the handling of the Epstein case by then-State Attorney Barry Krischer. June: The grand jury, after hearing from only one girl, returns an indictment of one count of solicitation of prostitution. The charge does not reflect that the victim in question and others were minors. July: Epstein’s powerhouse legal team tries to negotiate a deal with the State Attorney’s Office. Lawyers discuss a deferred prosecution in which Epstein would enter a pretrial intervention program and serve no jail time. July: After pressure from the Palm Beach police chief, the FBI opens a federal investigation, dubbed “Operation Leap Year.’’ Documents list the possible crime as “child prostitution.’’ November: The FBI begins interviewing potential witnesses and victims from Florida, New York and New Mexico. 2007 May: As the U.S. Attorney’s Office prepares to present the case to a federal grand jury, Epstein’s attorneys request a meeting to discuss the investigation. June: A 53-page indictment is prepared by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as, simultaneously, plea negotiations are initiated with Epstein’s legal team. July: Grand jury subpoenas are issued for Epstein’s computers, which were apparently removed from his Palm Beach home prior to the police search. August: The U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, enters into direct discussions about the plea agreement; a motion to compel production of Epstein’s computers is delayed. September: Federal prosecutors draw up several federal plea agreements that are rejected by Epstein and his attorneys. Epstein signs a non-prosecution agreement on Sept. 24, but his attorneys continue to delay his court appearance. Alexander Acosta has been criticized for his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case as U.S. attorney. He later became the dean of Florida International University’s law school and, later still, President Trump’s secretary of labor. Miami Herald file photo October: With the non-prosecution agreement still being debated, Acosta meets with Epstein lawyer Jay Lefkowitz at the West Palm Beach Marriott on Okeechobee Boulevard to discuss finalizing a deal. Among the terms agreed upon: that the victims would not be notified, that the deal would be kept under seal and all grand jury subpoenas would be canceled. The Marriott hotel in West Palm Beach, at 1001 Okeechobee Blvd., is where U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta met with Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney to work out his plea deal. Emily Michot [email protected] November: Epstein’s lawyers object to an addendum to the agreement. The provision called for a special master to appoint an attorney to represent Epstein victims’ rights to civil compensation. December: The two sides continue to debate the addendum. Epstein attorney Kenneth Starr asks for a review of the agreement by the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, further delaying its execution. Victims are told the investigation is continuing. 2008 January: Epstein attorney, Lefkowitz, calls Acosta, telling him his client will not go through with the agreement because it requires him to register as a sex offender. February: With the plea negotiations and the Justice Department review still in limbo, the FBI continues its probe, locating more witnesses and evidence. March: Preparations are made for a new federal grand jury presentation. In court documents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office notes that Epstein’s victims are being harassed by his lawyers, who are not specifically named. May: The Justice Department issues finding that, if a plea deal is not reached, Epstein can be federally prosecuted. June: Epstein’s lawyers revisit plea negotiations, and on June 30, Epstein appears in a Palm Beach County courtroom. He pleads guilty to state charges: one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18. He is sentenced to 18 months in jail, followed by a year of community control or house arrest. He is adjudicated as a convicted sex offender who must register twice a year in Florida. July: Epstein’s victims learn about his plea in state court after the fact. They file an emergency petition to force federal prosecutors to comply with the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which mandates certain rights for crime victims, including the right to be informed about plea agreements and the right to appear at sentencing. August: Epstein’s victims learn that he has already been sent to jail, and that the federal investigation is over. They seek to have his plea agreement unsealed, but federal prosecutors argue against releasing the agreement, commencing a yearlong court battle to learn the terms of Epstein’s plea bargain. October: Epstein begins work release from the county stockade. He is picked up by his private driver six days a week and transported to an office in West Palm Beach, where he accepts visitors for up to 12 hours a day. He returns to the stockade in the evenings to sleep. 2009 July: Epstein is released from the Palm Beach County stockade, five months early. He must register as a sex offender and is on probation for a year, confined to his Palm Beach home except to travel to his office in West Palm Beach. However, records show he frequently makes trips to Manhattan and to his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands. August: Palm Beach Police Capt. George Frick finds Epstein walking along A1A in the middle of the afternoon, when he was supposed to be at work in his office in downtown West Palm Beach. Epstein says he is walking to work, even though the location where he is found is not a direct route to his office. His probation officer says Epstein has permission to get some exercise. September: The federal non-prosecution agreement is made public. By September, at least a dozen civil lawsuits have been filed by women who allege they were molested by Epstein when they were underage. Epstein begins the process of settling them out of court. Jeffrey Epstein never went to federal prison but his butler/houseman, Alfredo Rodriguez, did, for obstruction of justice. He was busted for hiding Epstein’s journal and trying to sell it. He died in prison. © Facebook November: One of Epstein’s former butlers tries to sell to an undercover FBI agent a black book filled with the names of hundreds of girls and young women that Epstein allegedly procured for sex and massages. The butler tells FBI agents he witnessed nude underage girls at Epstein’s pool and had known that the millionaire was having sex with them. He also said he saw pornography involving underage girls on Epstein’s computers. The butler/houseman, Alfredo Rodriguez, is later charged with obstruction of justice and sentenced to federal prison. He dies in 2015. The contents of the black book become public as part of several civil lawsuits. 2010 April: Flight logs obtained as part of civil lawsuits against Epstein show an assortment of politicians, academics, celebrities, heads of state and world leaders flying on Epstein’s jets in the early 2000s. Among them: former President Bill Clinton, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. 2011 March: Two of Epstein’s victims file a motion in federal court accusing the government of violating their rights by failing to notify them about the plea deal and keeping it secret. Among other things, they want the plea deal invalidated in the hopes of sending Epstein to prison. They accuse federal prosecutors of deceiving them with “false notification letters.’’ September: U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra rejects the U.S. Attorney’s Office argument that it was under no obligation to notify victims prior to striking a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein because there were no federal charges filed against him. The decision marks a victory for Epstein’s victims, but the case will drag on for seven more years. November: Epstein must register in New York as the highest and most dangerous level of sex offender, despite efforts by him and the New York District Attorney’s office to lower the classification. A Level 3 status means “high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety exists,” according to the state’s guidelines. 2012 March-December: Calling himself a “celebrated philanthropist’’ and a “renowned educational investor,’’ Epstein undertakes a public relations campaign to counter bad press about his sexual exploits. His foundation donates millions to scientific research and sponsors global conferences on ways to achieve world peace and save the planet. He funds cancer and educational research projects around the country. 2015 January: Virginia Roberts files court papers in Florida claiming that she was forced by Epstein to have sex with Prince Andrew and lawyer Alan Dershowitz when she was underage. In a sworn affidavit, she provides photographs of her with the prince and with Epstein’s close associate, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. She claims Maxwell worked as Epstein’s madam, which she denies. Dershowitz and the prince deny her claims as well, setting off a series of legal actions between Dershowitz and Roberts’ attorneys that are later resolved in an out-of-court settlement. April: A federal judge rules that Roberts cannot join the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit and that her affidavit — accusing Prince Andrew and Dershowitz of having sex with her when she was underage — be stricken from the case. Dershowitz said the ruling meant he was vindicated. However, the judge does not address the veracity of Roberts’ claims, writing: “The factual details regarding with whom and where the Jane Does engaged in sexual activities are immaterial and impertinent to this central claim.’’ September: Roberts sues Maxwell in federal court in New York, claiming that Epstein’s alleged madam defamed her in public statements in the media. The lawsuit is widely viewed as a vessel for Epstein’s victims to expose the scope of Epstein’s crimes. Several civil lawsuits filed the same year allege that Epstein and Maxwell operated an international sex trafficking operation. Virginia Roberts holds a photo of herself at age 16, when she alleges she was being sexually abused by Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Roberts was employed by Epstein for massages and sex at his Palm Beach and New York homes, and traveled with him on his corporate jet to his private island, where he allegedly had her engage in sex with his friends and associates. Emily Michot [email protected] 2016 June: A lawsuit is filed in Manhattan by a woman who once used the name Katie Johnson, claiming that she was raped by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a party at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 1994 when she was 13 years old. Trump and Epstein both categorically deny it ever happened. Attorney Brad Edwards is representing several of Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers. Emily Michot [email protected] November: Johnson backs out of a press conference just days before Election Day, saying she had been threatened and was fearful. She later drops the lawsuit. 2017 February: President Trump nominates former Miami federal prosecutor Acosta as U.S. secretary of labor. Acosta is compelled at his confirmation hearing to briefly address questions about the deal he approved for Epstein. One lawmaker requests more records from the Epstein case. Acosta is confirmed. June: Roberts settles her lawsuit with Maxwell for an undisclosed sum. 2018 December: Civil trial is scheduled in Palm Beach County Court on Bradley Edwards’ allegations that Epstein sued him to punish him for representing several of his victims. The malicious-prosecution lawsuit is set to begin Dec. 4. Epstein has indicated he will not appear in court for trial.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/ ... rylink=cpy

[admin]

Trump and Epstein Feuded Over Mansion Russian Oligarch Bought, Says President’s Biographer. As Trump tries to deflect attention from Jeffery Epstein, author Michael Wolff, who has written about Trump and interviewed Epstein, reveals financial connections with a Russian oligarch.
by Stash Luczkiw
Kyiv Post
July 31, 2025, 3:44 pm
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57315

In 2004, sex-trafficker Jeffery Epstein was looking to buy a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and asked his then-friend Donald Trump for advice about how to move the swimming pool, according to author Michael Wolff, who has written four books about the Trump presidency.

After Epstein showed Trump the house he was bidding on for $36 million, Trump went behind his back and bid $40 million for the property, says Wolff, who told Washington Monthly’s Jonathan Alter that he is sitting on 100 hours of recorded interviews with the late Jeffery Epstein.

According to Wolff, Epstein was “deeply involved” at the time with Trump’s “scattered finances” and understood that Trump “didn’t have $40 million to pay for this house.” If that were the case, then it must have been “someone else’s $40 million dollars.”

Wolff says that Epstein believed Trump was using the money of Russian billionaire oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who eventually wound up buying that very mansion from Trump four years later, in 2008, for $95 million – more than double what Trump had paid.

Rybolovlev made his money through his former ownership of a large stake in Uralkali, a Russian fertilizer company.

Wolff has appeared on the MeidasTouch podcast as well as a host of other media outlets since MAGA cohorts have begun calling for the release of the FBI’s Epstein files. Wolff reveals conversations with Jeffery Epstein that contradict much of what Donald Trump has said about his relationship with sex offender who, according to police, hanged himself in a New York jail cell in 2019.

On the podcast, Wolff explains how Trump’s version of his fallout with Epstein is demonstrably false.

Trump claimed on Air Force One, while travelling back to the United States from the UK on Wednesday, that his disagreement with Epstein occurred because he was “stealing” workers from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, specifically spa workers.

In response to a reporter’s question about whether one of the spa workers was Virginia Giuffre – who had accused Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, of recruiting her to join their predatory ring – Trump said: “I think so… he stole her, and she had no complaints about us.”

Giuffre, who committed suicide in April 2025 while struggling with renal failure after a car accident, had also sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault.

[x]
A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around Ms. Giuffre’s waist. Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s co-conspirator, stood at the right. Photo: AFP, via Us District Court — Southern District.

According to Wolff, after Epstein threatened to sue Trump for “fronting for someone else” in the purchase of the mansion, “Epstein believed Trump then informed the police in Palm Beach that he had a never-ending stream of underage girls in and out of his house there, and thus began his long years of legal peril.”

In his interview with Alter, Wolff also claims: “Epstein talked about how Trump liked to pick up girls, sleep with other men’s wives, liked black women, and at one point, they shared a girlfriend for almost a year.”

Conspiracy theorists – most prominent among them being Joe Rogan – have long cast doubt on the suicide explanation of Epstein’s death.

Longstanding connections with Russian mobsters

As a Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s, Trump had no choice but to deal with the Italian mafia, which controlled the cement industry and labor unions, and would systematically extort real estate developers.

Thanks to Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohen, who represented prominent mafiosi in the city, the future president was able to avoid many of the obstacles other real estate developers faced.

During that same period, Trump managed to solidify links with Russian organized crime, which had begun to make headway in New York City. In 1984, Russian mobster David Bogatin allegedly teamed up with Michael Franzese, a member of New York’s Colombo crime family to buy six condominiums in Trump Tower by laying $6 million in cash on the table.

In “American Kompromat,” a 2021 book by Craig Unger, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets claims that Trump had been recruited by Moscow in the 1980s.

“Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset… and proved so willing to parrot anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow,” Shvets told the Guardian in 2021.

Shvets was a KGB major during the 1980s with cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Soviet news agency TASS. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship.

In the book, which relies heavily on Shvets’ recollections, Unger describes how Trump first came to the Russians’ attention in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. In 1979, once she married Donald Trump, already a notable American real estate mogul, Czech Secret Service spied on Ivana at home and abroad, and reportedly questioned her father about the couple after his trips to the United States. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later, Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central Station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue, near the hotel.

Shvets told the Guardian that Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denied that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

A 2017 Politico article by Luke Harding sustains that “according to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.”

Unger, however, has been quick to point out that the Trump recruitment process was almost fortuitous. “He was an asset,” Shvets said of Trump. “It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started… the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

Shvets noted that Trump was the perfect target: “His vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election,” he said, referring to the 2016 election.

[admin]

https://okmagazine.com/p/jeffrey-epstei ... oped-1993/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tein-files

[admin]

I dated Jeffrey Epstein. The files must be released
by Stacey Williams
The Guardian
Thu 4 Sep 2025 06.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tein-files

This is not a partisan issue. The American people – and Epstein’s many victims – deserve transparency

In 1986, my life went from black-and-white to color. It was the year I taped a Duran Duran poster to my rural Pennsylvania high school locker, and then months later hung out with band members backstage at the Paris runway shows. It was the year I went from cleaning bathrooms for $3.35 an hour to making $50k in a day for a Maybelline shoot. Modeling opened a door into a gorgeous, creative, elite world – a dream born of a biological accident.

It is also what led me, decades later, into the very uncomfortable position of speaking out about the horrific legacy of the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whom I briefly dated in 1993.

I was introduced to Epstein at a dinner party, which I attended at the request of my then agent, Faith Kates. He was charming and smart, and didn’t condescend as we connected over current events and the state of the world, a rare experience for me in those scenarios.

The brief relationship that emerged was consensual. But some of the events that took place within the confines of that relationship were not.

Last October, I came forward with a story I had kept private (with the exception of sharing with my closest friends) for decades: Epstein once walked me into Donald Trump’s office at Trump Tower, where I was groped by Trump as Epstein stood by and watched. (Trump denies that this ever happened). For years I stayed silent in order to protect my privacy and my family. But with the release of a documentary in which I was featured, I felt I had to tell the truth. To support my account, I was polygraphed by a renowned examiner, my close friends were interviewed to corroborate that I had shared this story over the years, and Trump biographer Michael Wolff confirmed that Epstein disclosed the incident to him.

More recently, I have also shared something Epstein once told me over tea and Zabar’s walnut bread at his mansion: that he had video of me disrobed in a bedroom in his home. He described it as “the most beautiful thing” he had seen. That comment chilled me then, and it haunts me still. When I watched FBI agents raid Epstein’s homes in 2019, I grew nauseous at the thought that such videos could have ended up in the hands of other people.

Let me be clear: I did not consent to being groped by Donald Trump, and I did not consent to being filmed by Jeffrey Epstein. I am speaking out not because of politics, but because the American people – and Epstein’s many victims – deserve transparency.

This is not a partisan issue. Being a victim crosses party lines. That’s why I’ve been encouraged to see Representatives Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, and Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, from opposite sides of the aisle, standing besides Epstein’s victims on Capitol Hill, demanding the release of the Epstein files. Hundreds of women have lived in the shadow of this man’s crimes. They deserve truth, not secrecy.

Yet what we’ve seen is a game of political chicken. The Wall Street Journal reported that the attorney general, Pam Bondi, privately told Trump his name appears in Epstein-related files. The justice department’s second-in-command, Todd Blanche – Trump’s former lawyer – met behind closed doors not with victims, but with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein abuse underage girls. And despite public assurances that there is “nothing to see”, Congress recessed early rather than debate the issue. Maxwell, meanwhile, was quietly moved to a more comfortable minimum-security prison in Texas, despite the fact that she repeatedly deflected and minimized facts during her interview.

Two days ago, in a deceptive move supposedly intended to signal transparency, the House oversight committee released more than 33,000 files related to Epstein that it received from the justice department. As Representative Massie pointed out, 97% of those pages are “already in public domain”.

So here I am, like so many women in my position, mustering the courage to disclose and jumping through hoops to prove my truth – while perpetrators and enablers enjoy the benefit of secrecy. It is baffling that leaders from the president on down insist there is nothing to see, yet refuse to release the actual files. It is equally baffling to hear Alan Dershowitz deny that surveillance tapes exist, when testimony and evidence suggest otherwise. Maria Farmer, one of the first women to report Epstein and Maxwell for sexual crimes, told CBS News that Epstein had hidden cameras throughout his home. A recent New York Times report included images of video cameras inside Epstein’s mansion, even above his bed. And Epstein specifically boasted that he had video footage of me.

I know my pain is shared by countless survivors. I think of Virginia Giuffre, who tragically died by suicide this April, and of the retraumatization survivors endure as they watch Ghislaine Maxwell settle into a more comfortable facility while their stories remain buried. That is not justice.

We deserve peace of mind. We deserve healing that comes with accountability. And that will never come so long as our trauma is reduced to partisan warfare. Sexual violence and trafficking have no political party.

It is time to put politics aside, release the Epstein files and help free the women at the center of this tragedy from a nightmare that has lasted for decades.

Stacey Williams is a former model

************************************

Stacey Williams says Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein ‘coordinated’ groping incident. Former model said of incident at Trump Tower in 1993: ‘I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of twisted game’
by Jessica Glenza
The Guardian
Fri 25 Oct 2024 09.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... mp-epstein


Stacey Williams in October. Photograph: Marion Curtis/Starpix/Rex/Shutterstock

The former model Stacey Williams said she thought Donald Trump groped her to show off to her then boyfriend, the late financier and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, when the couple dropped by to visit him in Trump Tower in New York in 1993.

In her first detailed, on-camera interview since discussing assault allegations with the Guardian, Williams late on Thursday told CNN that she recalled the former president and Epstein smiled at each other as the property mogul was feeling her up, which gave her the impression the entire incident was a “coordinated” game between the two men.

Her account comes just weeks before the presidential election, in which Trump and the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, are essentially tied, according to polls. Trump has denied Williams’s accounts.

“The second he was in front of me, he pulled me into him and his hands were just on me and didn’t come off,” Williams told CNN, echoing her account to the Guardian.

“Then the hands started moving on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt, back up, sort of – they were just on me the whole time, and I froze,” she said.

Williams briefly dated Epstein in the 1990s. At the time, she told the Guardian, she and Epstein were walking through Manhattan when he suggested they visit Trump at his Trump Tower complex on Fifth Avenue.

The two were good friends, she said. Trump later distanced himself from Epstein after the financier was convicted of being a sex offender in Florida, several years before he was arrested in New York on federal sex offenses in 2019 and killed himself while in custody awaiting trial.

She added, as she did in her recounting to the Guardian, that she believed now that the incident was planned by Epstein and Trump all along. When they encountered Trump, she alleges he immediately grabbed and groped her, right in front of her boyfriend.

“This context made no sense because the hands were on me and he and Jeffrey just kept talking and looking at each other and smiling,” she said. Later, when the couple left, she said Epstein berated her for allowing Trump to touch her, and that the whole incident left her confused and sick.

“I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated, I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game,” she told CNN. “I felt a wave of shame,” she said, and took the memory of the incident, “put it in a little box inside of me, turned the key, locked it.”

Williams told the Guardian this week in an exclusive first interview that she got the sense, at the time, that Trump and Epstein were “really, really good friends”. Williams also shared an undated postcard that she said Trump later sent her, with a view of Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.

“Your home away from home,” the postcard read. “Love, Donald”.

Trump’s campaign, responding to CNN, said Williams’s allegations were a “fake story [that] was contrived by Kamala Harris’ campaign,” to distract from a second incident, in which Doug Emhoff is accused of slapping a former girlfriend. A campaign spokesperson for Harris, the US vice-president, earlier this month denied the allegation against her husband.

Williams’s account will add to a long list of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, ranging from the writer E Jean Carroll, who was eventually vindicated by a civil jury that found Trump liable for sexual abuse, to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, who accused the former president of raping her, in a divorce deposition.

Williams said she gained the courage to come forward about the incident following the release of a recent documentary about the magazine Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issues, called Beyond the Gaze.

“I can’t control when a documentary comes out, I can’t control its premiering two weeks before the election,” Williams told CNN. Although Williams had alluded to the incident in social media comments, she had never told her story in detail until this week.

“It takes a lot of guts, and you have to really prepare yourself for that onslaught, and I’m ready now,” she said. “Just bring it.”

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

Sir James Goldsmith: Rich, Loud and Ignorant. Goldsmith’s Trap-Crap
by Gwydion M. Williams
1994-1997
https://gwydionwilliams.com/history-and ... -ignorant/

[I have no exact record of when I wrote this review of Goldsmith’s book The Trap. Some time between the book’s publication in 1994 and the death of Sir James Goldsmith in 1997. But most of what I said then remains relevant: general truths about the rise of the New Right and the shallow thinking behind it. And how a self-made millionaire can also be a ranting fool.]

-- Jeffrey Epstein, My Very, Very Sick Pal. A very weird interview with Stuart Pivar about Epstein, his science parties, his “pathology,” and the industrial scale of it all. by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, August 23, 2019

CHAPTER 11. THE RISE OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN

UNUSUAL BEGINNINGS

Jeffrey Epstein was born on January 20, 1953 to Paula (nee Stolofsky) and Seymour Epstein in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a homemaker while his father was a groundskeeper for the New York Parks Department. His parents valued education, hoping that sending their sons – Jeffrey and Mark – to the right schools could be a "way out," or rather, a way up into a higher strata of New York society.1

Epstein was raised in the Lafayette neighborhood around Coney Island and attended Lafayette High School. In 1967, at age 14, he also attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He reportedly received a scholarship to Interlochen for his aptitude at playing the bassoon.2 As an adult, Epstein would later donate heavily to Interlochen, from 1990 to 2003, and used his connection to the school to recruit unwitting female teens with musical talents into his sex trafficking and sex blackmail enterprise. Epstein was even allowed to construct his own lodge at Interlochen, the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge (now the Green Lake Lodge), before the school cut ties with him after his first conviction in 2007.3 Given his own early attendance and his subsequent return for nefarious purposes, some have suggested that Epstein himself may have been groomed at Interlochen.4

In 1969, two years after he attended Interlochen, Epstein graduated from Lafayette high school at age 16 after skipping two grades. Epstein then studied at Cooper Union, from the fall of 1969 through the spring semester of 1971. He attended New York University (NYU) from September 1971 to 1974, but never graduated. Per a 2002 profile in New York Magazine, Epstein had studied at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.5

During this period, Epstein claims to have backpacked across Europe with friends in 1971 and, while visiting London, met British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose patron was Queen Elizabeth II. Epstein would later claim to have played the piano for a du Pré performance during this visit and that, through her, he gained access to the British royals, ultimately leading to his close relationship with Prince Andrew, Duke of York.6 It’s unclear when du Pré would have made such an introduction, but it would have had to have occurred before her 1987 death. What does seem certain is that Epstein, during this trip, did befriend some British aristocrats as, a few short years later, he was seen at the New York mansion of British tycoon and corporate raider James Goldsmith.

It’s unclear how Epstein, while ostensibly backpacking, had come to make du Pré’s acquaintance, though du Pré did have ties to the Israeli and New York Jewish communities through her 1967 conversion to Judaism and subsequent marriage that same year to Daniel Barenboim, as well as her friendships with musicians Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman. It’s possible that Epstein met du Pré through some mutual connection in these circles. Years later, Epstein would claim to have once been a concert pianist, with media reports from the early 1990s onwards referencing such claims.7 However, some who knew Epstein early in life, including his brother Mark, give little weight to Epstein’s claim to have been an accomplished pianist.8

In the latter half of 1974,, Epstein began working at the elite Dalton School, teaching mathematics and physics. He would remain with the school until 1976. There has been much disagreement in the mainstream press over who at Dalton was responsible for hiring Jeffrey Epstein. At the time Epstein began working at Dalton, the headmaster was Peter Branch. Branch, when contacted in 2019 by professor and author Thomas Volscho, did not recall hiring Epstein and was "relatively certain" that the previous headmaster, Donald Barr, or perhaps the head of the Math Department, had hired Epstein because "hiring decisions were typically made in the Spring."

Branch also noted that Barr "liked to hire unconventional teachers to enhance the educational experience for students at Dalton."9 Epstein certainly fell in the unconventional category, as he lacked the academic credentials to even teach at a public school in New York City. Vanity Fair later reported that Barr had hired other "gifted college dropouts," which would make his hire of Epstein not as much of an anomaly as some outlets have implied.10

Donald Barr was the son of an economist and psychologist who had joined the OSS during World War II. He is alleged to have been a member of an OSS "target team" in Germany and to have worked at a prisoner of war camp.11 His son, William Barr, would subsequently follow his father into the world of intelligence and served in the CIA from 1971 to 1977, which overlaps with the last few years his father was headmaster at the Dalton School – including the year Donald Barr is alleged to have hired Jeffrey Epstein. William Barr, whose alleged role in Iran-Contra was mentioned in Chapter 8, would go on to serve as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, and served in that capacity when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and found dead in a New York prison in 2019.

After exiting from US intelligence, Barr briefly worked as a literary editor and then went into academia. He taught English at Columbia for ten years while pursuing graduate studies. There, he started a series of conferences in 1955 focused on "the identification, guidance, and instruction of the gifted." Barr joined the School of Engineering the following year and these conferences then grew into the Science Honors program, which offered Saturday classes to gifted high schoolers.12 At the same time he was running this high school-focused program, Barr was also directing the Talent Preservation Project, "a massive research and therapy program for high school under-achievers." It is possible that there may have been an early Epstein-Barr connection if Epstein had attended one of these programs for gifted high school students.

Donald Barr would become headmaster of the Dalton School in 1964 and, a decade later, in 1974, Donald Barr would leave the school under a cloud of controversy, amid claims that he had meddled in the college admission prospects of prominent students, including the son of writer Betty Friedan. The Dalton parent who is credited with orchestrating Barr’s ouster was Richard Ravitch, a real estate magnate who served in several government-appointed positions related to housing during his career. Ravitch claimed that, by the end of his stint as headmaster, Barr was reviled by many Dalton teachers as well as parents.13

Soon after leaving his post as headmaster, Donald Barr published Space Relations, a bizarre science fiction novel that deals with power, drugs, and sex slavery, which has fueled speculation about Barr’s apparent decision to hire someone like Epstein and what the fantasy book implies about Barr’s own "extracurricular" interests.

During his time at Dalton, Jeffrey Epstein taught mostly seniors, ages 17 and 18. He also coached the math team, which competed locally and had a few notable victories under Epstein’s leadership. The school’s newspaper, The Daltonian, reported on March 5, 1976 that Epstein wanted to start a "math-track team" due to his "unique philosophy of integrating physical exercise with spiritual and mathematical stimulation." An earlier issue of the school paper refers to Epstein as "the ivory show man on the piano," again raising the running theme of Epstein’s alleged musical talents.14

Several Dalton alumni later told various media outlets in 2019 how Epstein attended student parties during his time as a Dalton teacher. One former student who graduated from Dalton in 1976, Scott Spizer, told the New York Times that Epstein was well known among students for the "persistent attention" he directed at teenage girls in the hallways and recalled that Epstein had attended a party where Dalton students were drinking. "I can remember thinking at the time 'This is wrong,’" Spizer later stated. A 1978 graduate of Dalton, Paul Grossman, also recalled Epstein attending student parties, stating that "it was weird" and that "everyone talked about it." A woman who attended Dalton during this period, but asked to remain anonymous, claimed that Epstein had "made multiple attempts to spend time with her away from school" and she also specifically recalled "reporting Epstein’s advances toward another female student to the school’s headmaster."15

The headmaster at that time, Peter Branch, did not mention such reports when he was interviewed in 2019 regarding Epstein’s time at the school. This may relate to the fact that several Dalton alumni who attended during this period asserted that student-teacher relationships at the school "were not unheard of," suggesting that Epstein’s alleged behavior was part of a larger problem, as opposed to an aberration.16 Branch has asserted that Epstein left the school following concerns from his colleagues in the math and science departments that his teaching skills had failed to improve over the previous year.17 "He was a young teacher who didn’t come up to snuff. So, ultimately, he was asked to leave," Branch was quoted as saying in late 2019.18

BEAR STEARNS AND THE BRONFMANS

After Epstein left the Dalton School in 1976, he went to work on Wall Street for Bear Stearns. There are two conflicting accounts of how he landed his first job there – as a junior assistant to a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. Both accounts intimately involve Alan "Ace" Greenberg, then a partner at Bear Stearns and who would become the bank’s CEO in roughly two years’ time, in 1978.

One account appears to have first been circulated in a 2002 profile on Epstein published by New York Magazine. Per that account, while still at the Dalton School, "So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: 'What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street – why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.’"19 However, a year later, in the 2003 Vanity Fair profile penned by Vicky Ward, it is claimed that the connection with Greenberg was more direct, with Epstein tutoring Greenberg’s son who attended Dalton and also being "friendly" with one of his daughters.20 Both claims have been repeated by numerous mainstream and independent outlets over the years, though Greenberg’s daughter, Lynne Koeppel (nee Greenberg), has publicly backed the version of events as published in 2002 by New York Magazine.21 Yet, other sources cite Koeppel as having recommended Epstein to her father.22 Regardless of which account is closer to reality, it is agreed that Greenberg was ultimately the person who brought Epstein into Bear Stearns.

Once installed at the bank, Epstein’s ascent was rapid and he was mentored by both Greenberg and James Cayne, who had also been hired by Greenberg years prior. While he started off as a floor trader, he soon "began working with wealthy clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric markets."23 According to a former senior Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business, "Epstein’s accumulated knowledge of the U.S. tax codes – and how rich people can avoid taxes through various investments – made him one of Bear’s prized assets in its small, but specialized brokerage department." "He never went to college, but he knew everything about taxes. In fact, he could figure out just about anything if he studied it. The guy was a genius," the former executive was quoted as saying.24 Thanks to these talents, Epstein became a limited partner in relatively short order, by 1980. While working at the bank, he met his former girlfriend Paula Heil Fisher, now an opera producer.

Epstein abruptly left Bear Stearns in 1981. In the years before he became notorious, he claimed to have left because he wished "to run his own business." However, within the company, claims abounded that Epstein had been involved in a "technical infringement," with Epstein’s later associate, Steven Hoffenberg, claiming that Epstein had left the bank after he was caught performing "illegal operations." The former Bear Stearns executive interviewed by Fox Business claimed that Epstein had been asked to leave over "very serious stuff," which he insisted was related to "a significant expense account violation concerning an airline ticket that upper management was misled about."25 These claims were denied by Cayne and Epstein, while Greenberg said he was unable to recall the circumstances. In 2003, Cayne supported Epstein’s version of events, stating that he had left the bank of "his own volition" because he wanted to strike out on his own.

However, as noted by Vanity Fair, the SEC’s records of Epstein in 1981 tell a different story. Per those records, Epstein was interviewed, along with other Bear Stearns employees as part of an investigation into insider trading at the bank. The insider trading case revolved around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981 for St. Joe Minerals Corp by the Bronfman-owned company Seagram Company Ltd. A handful of investors were ultimately found guilty of insider trading, including Giuseppe Tome, former head of overseas operations of Bache & Company and E.F. Hutton.

In Tome’s case, he was ordered to "disgorge," or hand over, $3.5 million in illegal profits related to the 1981 failed takeover attempt by Seagram in mid-1986. However, Tome left the US shortly after the SEC began its investigation and did not return to the country after the court’s decision, complicating the enforcement of the ruling against him.

The court claimed that Tome had "insinuated himself into the confidence of Seagram Co. Chairman Edgar M. Bronfman." However, a spokesperson for Bronfman declined to discuss his relationship with Tome and, in court testimony, Bronfman had admitted to discussing "Seagram’s secrets" with Tome because Tome counted with "20 years in this business … he ought to know the rules. I assume he does know the rules."

The Los Angeles Times described the Tome-Bronfman relationship in greater detail:

According to testimony in the case, Tome and Bronfman met in July, 1980. Bronfman was impressed with Tome’s financial acumen and within weeks had made him an unofficial adviser to Seagram, a major producer and marketer of spirits and wine, on foreign currency matters.

The two men also struck up a close personal friendship, and Bronfman opened a commodities account at Tome’s Geneva brokerage. The pair invested together in "Sophisticated Ladies," the Broadway show, and at one point Bronfman even covered a bounced check that Tome had issued to the show’s producers. The families vacationed together in Switzerland and the hunt country of Virginia.

Throughout this time, Bronfman was telling Tome of Seagram’s secret plans for major corporate acquisitions. Pollack’s order indicated that Tome used inside information to trade in stock and options of Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets. (Those trades were not cited in the SEC lawsuit, however.) In some cases, testimony showed, Tome learned from Bronfman of Seagram’s plans even before its board of directors.

On March 9, 1981, Bronfman declined a dinner invitation from Tome, saying he had to visit Montreal for a board meeting. Tome concluded that a Seagram offer was imminent for St. Joe, which he knew as Bronfman’s next target."26

There is also the fact that Bronfman had considerable connections to Tome’s former employer Bache & Company, a company with ties to the OSS-organized crime networks previously discussed in chapter 1. For instance, the Loeb banking dynasty had intermarried into the family of Jules Bache of Bache & Company as well as into the Bronfmans, with Edgar Bronfman’s wife Ann being the daughter of John Loeb. Not only did the Bronfmans, Loebs, and Baches mingle through marriage, but the multi-million dollar holdings of all three families combined "to make up the largest single holding of stock in New York’s Empire Trust Company" – Edgar Bronfman had joined that company’s board in 1963.27

Notably, the Empire Trust Company, with Bronfman still intimately involved, announced a merger with the Bank of New York (BoNY) in 1968.28 Bronfman was placed on the board of the Bank of New York after the merger and remained there at least through 1975, if not later.29 As previously mentioned in chapter 9, BoNY essentially merged with the banking network of Bruce Rappaport by the 1980s and, by 1992, executives at the bank were found to be closely associated with Russian mobster and Robert Maxwell business associate Semion Mogilevich.

When the SEC investigation took place, Bronfman subsequently claimed to have no knowledge of insider trading by Tome and claimed that Tome, conveniently outside of the country and tried in absentia, lied to him about having been involved in illegal trades related to the attempted takeover of St. Joe’s. As the 1986 court case against Tome makes clear, Bronfman’s ties to Tome were considerable and he had a history of voluntarily supplying the man with Seagram’s "secret plans" before the company’s board even knew, as the Los Angeles Times had noted. It appears, from Tome’s case, that Bronfman seemed to have thought nothing of sharing "secret plans" with those outside the company and within his inner circle. Also of note is that Tome, and presumably others [LC: Jeffrey Epstein?] made insider trades on Texaco and Santa Fe, two tentative Seagram targets, and profited off those as well. However, the trades involving those companies were, for reasons still unclear, excluded from the SEC investigation.

Another figure sued in connection with insider trading as part of the failed Seagram takeover attempt was Dennis B. Levine, "a prominent mergers specialist with the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banking firm" who allegedly made $12.6 million in illegal profits from the deal.30 Drexel Burnham Lambert and many of its more infamous employees are mentioned throughout this book, as – at this time – Drexel was "corralling the majority of American [corporate] raiders."31

Dennis Levine was directly involved with many of these "raiders", specifically Ron Perelman, who dined with Epstein at Epstein’s home throughout the 2000s and whose political fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign was attended by Epstein in the mid-90s (see Chapter 16). Levine worked regularly with Perelman, serving as the "lead banker" for Perelman’s 1985 takeover of Revlon, which Levine called "the high point" of his career.32

In addition, Levine also played a key role in the hostile takeover of Crown Zellerbach by Sir James Goldsmith, a member of the Clermont Club mentioned in Chapter 4. Levine was intimately involved in Goldsmith’s 1984-1985 takeover of Crown Zellerbach. That takeover was actually the brainchild of Rothschild Inc. and its then-President Robert S. Pirie.33 Goldsmith was a longtime business associate of the Rothschilds and a distant cousin of the family.34

As will be mentioned again in chapter 15, Pirie and Rothschild Inc. were later the architects of Robert Maxwell’s takeover of Macmillan in 1989. By 1989, Maxwell and Goldsmith were closely associated, and Goldsmith would also later [LC: You mean, "sooner."] have his own ties to Jeffrey Epstein.35 Goldsmith apparently knew Epstein long before Epstein had started at Bear Stearns. According to a former friend of Epstein’s, art collector Stuart Pivar, he had first met Epstein at "Jimmy Goldsmith’s mansion" in the early 1970s. "There," Pivar later told Mother Jones, "there was somebody playing the piano with great virtuosity. And it was Jeffrey Epstein."36 Epstein’s ties to Goldsmith may have come through his daughter, Isabel Goldsmith, who has numerous telephone numbers and two addresses in Epstein’s "little black book" of contacts.37

In the context of this 1981 takeover attempt by Seagram, it is worth noting that Pirie’s soon-to-be "second in command," Gerald Goldsmith, was previously the executive vice president of E.F. Hutton, where Giuseppe Tome had also served in a top executive position. Goldsmith left to join the Rothschild bank in 1982.38 (There is no familial relationship between Gerald Goldsmith and James Goldsmith).

These networks that surrounded this SEC investigation would, after the fact, clearly intersect with Epstein’s own network within a few years’ time. This raises the possibility that this 1981 insider trading affair may have marked Epstein’s entry into these circles or may indicate that he had already developed connections there, as he was alleged to have been directly involved in such trades.

On March 12, 1981, a day after Seagram made the tender offer at the heart of this insider trading case, Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns. At some point in their investigation, the SEC was tipped off that Epstein knew something about relevant insider trades that had been made at Bear Stearns, and the SEC interviewed him on April 1st.

During that testimony, per SEC records, Epstein complained about how he had been disciplined for a possible "Reg D" violation where he was said to have lent money to a friend, who he later identified as Warren Eisenstein. Epstein had been questioned about the loan, per his recollection, on March 4th and, five days later, had been fined $2,500 by the bank. However, the SEC was mainly interested in the timing of Epstein’s exit from Bear Stearns and the Bronfman/Seagram-related insider trading. Epstein denied any connection and was never charged, but Vanity Fair noted that the SEC interviewers were skeptical of Epstein’s denials. Vanity Fair also noted that "if [Epstein] was such a big producer at Bear Stearns, [why would he] have given it up over a mere $2,500 fine."

It seems evident that the timing of Epstein’s "abrupt" departure and the Bronfman-related insider trades go a bit beyond mere coincidence. It certainly does seem unlikely that Epstein would abandon Bear Stearns over a relatively small fine (by the bank’s standards), unless he had received another offer of employment or if there was a risk that he would soon face greater, more costly problems at Bear Stearns.

Furthermore, given that Edgar Bronfman had been somewhat open about the plan for a Seagram takeover of St. Joe Mineral Corp., it is not outside the realm of possibility that those "rumors" would have made their way to Epstein. Epstein had become installed at Bear Stearns, and likely risen in its ranks so quickly, due to the patronage of Alan Greenberg, who was intimately involved in several of the same organizations as the Bronfmans, like the United Jewish Appeal and the Jerusalem Foundation (the latter was notably created by Teddy Kollek, see chapter 3). Like Greenberg, the Bronfmans also donated heavily to those same groups in addition to being closely involved in their affairs. Greenberg also, at some point, saw his philanthropic efforts intersect closely with those of Charles Bronfman, per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.39

Had Greenberg potentially been informed by a loose-lipped Edgar Bronfman, just as Giuseppe Tome had been, and passed this along to one of his "protégés" at Bear Stearns, Jeffrey Epstein? Or had Epstein, a protégé of Greenberg’s, been advising Bronfman on behalf of the bank? After all, Epstein was said to have worked "with wealthy clients on bigger projects that sought an edge in esoteric markets," and Bronfman could have been such a client.40

If so, it may have prompted Epstein’s "abrupt" resignation, not so much to protect a young Epstein, but potentially to protect Greenberg, who had – by then – risen to become Bear Stearns’s CEO. Greenberg being ensnared in the SEC’s investigation would have been a much bigger headache for the bank than Epstein – now, a former limited partner in the bank.

In addition, given the networks of both Giuseppe Tome and Danny Levine at this time, and how Epstein would become a fixture in those networks in short order, it may be possible that Epstein’s abrupt resignation was part of an effort not just to shield Greenberg, but the full extent of these particular networks in this 1981 insider trading scheme, which was considerably larger than the select components that the SEC had chosen to investigate.

If Epstein was advised to leave due to potential legal concerns, it is worth mentioning that, as noted in Chapter 6, Bear Stearns was represented by the law firm Rogers & Wells and, from 1976 to 1981, was specifically a client of William Casey. Though Casey likely wasn’t involved in this particular situation, given that he had become CIA director several weeks before the tender offer, it is worth reminding the reader that Casey’s influence is another potential factor to consider when examining this situation as well as Epstein’s activities immediately after leaving the bank.

THE FINANCIAL MERCENARY AND INTELLIGENCE ASSET

After leaving Bear Stearns, Epstein would later claim that he went on to manage "money only for billionaires," telling Vicky Ward in 2003 that "I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more."41 However, it appears that there was much more to the story, as the details of Epstein’s life, from his 1981 exit from Bear Stearns until around 1986, are murky at best. The details that are known about Epstein during this period point to something considerably different than Epstein’s own account of his activities at this time. This is particularly obvious when one considers that his formal role as a money manager did not appear to begin until 1988, when he founded J. Epstein & Co.42

Throughout the 1980s, Epstein’s main company was called Intercontinental Assets Group, which was incorporated in 1981.43 Apart from that, little about the company is known. However, there is little indication he used the company to manage billionaire wealth, as the existing evidence about his life during this decade points in another direction.

After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, a former friend of Epstein’s, Jesse Kornbluth, stated that Epstein had claimed to be a "bounty hunter" for the rich and powerful:

When we met in 1986, Epstein’s double identity intrigued me – he said he didn’t just manage money for clients with mega-fortunes, he was also a high-level bounty hunter. Sometimes, he told me, he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.44


Actress Anna Obregón later stated that she had hired Epstein, who mentioned his company Intercontinental Assets Group, to help her father, Madrid-based real estate magnate Antonio García Férnandez. García Férnandez had been one of several powerful Spanish individuals, which included members of the Spanish royal family, who had invested in Drysdale Government Securities, which collapsed due to fraud in 1982. Epstein had been hired by Obregón to "recover" money from the Drysdale collapse on behalf of her father, according to James Patterson’s book Filthy Rich.45

Similar claims also surfaced in [url=X]Vicky Ward’s 2003 profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair.[/url] Ward wrote that: "A few of the handful of current friends who have known him since the early 1980s recall that he used to tell them he was a 'bounty hunter,’ recovering lost or stolen money for the government or for very rich people. He has a license to carry a firearm."46

-- One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, by Whitney Webb

With so much of the world’s true wealth being sacrificed to the idols of Free Trade, I hesitate to criticise anyone who is making a stand against GATT and similar anti-social reforms. And James Goldsmith has certainly been a powerful voice raised in opposition. So I would like to find reasons to praise him.

On the other hand, I had got a good idea of Goldsmith’s broad outlook before I even looked at his ventures into politics with anti-GATT and The Trap. Over a number of years I had been making a general study of him and a few other tycoons, trying to find out what they had in common. The first thing I found was that the successful tycoon needs to be both clever and unreasonably lucky – the one in a thousand gambler who walks off with a big win. The fact that many try and only a few succeed does not mean that those few particularly deserved it.

Secondly, I found them falling into two distinct groups. Some, like James Watt or Bill Gates, grow rich by giving the public something useful. Others grew rich by merely working the structures of law, money and power to their own benefit. And this is definitely where one should place Goldsmith.

Thirdly, some of the tycoons feel that their great wealth gives them social responsibilities, whereas others deny this. Goldsmith, unlike even such gifted monstrous characters as Ford or Carnegie or Getty, has absolutely no concept of general social responsibility. Long before Thatcher, he was loudly denouncing the idea that industry and commerce should exist for any other purpose than making money for shareholders.

“Although corporations belong to their shareholders,’ he wrote not long afterwards in the Wall Street Journal, ‘corporate managements sometimes believe that the business that employs them has become an institution and that they are the trustees of that institution. Some believe that they have developed some sort of proprietorial rights. Shareholders then become no more than an inconvenience.”

Goldsmith’s ideal is for shareholders to be able treat the rest of the society as an inconvenience.

The ‘corporatism’ of the 1950s was more successful than anything before or since. It kept some sort of balance between the rival class interests, stopped societies from turning to drastic alternatives like Fascism or Communism. It accepted what Goldsmith strongly rejects – the ‘stakeholder’ principle, the notion that you take your profit only after taking care of all of your traditional obligations. Stakeholder or corporate societies are not utopian, but they work well enough, better than anything seen before or since. Britain was the first industrial society, and it emerged after it had destroyed many of the ‘stakeholder’ elements in its own society. This might mean that ‘stakeholder’ ideas are a burden – except that every subsequent industrialisation has had more stakeholder elements and has produced a more efficient and faster growing system than Britain’s.

The concept of a British ‘decline’ after 19th century greatness is an illusion. Looked at in isolation, Britain had continued to grow quite smoothly, and was in fact at its best in the period 1950 to 1975. It was just that the rest of the world was no longer standing still, and was in fact growing very much faster than Britain had ever managed.

Britain’s best period coincided with an even better period for the rest of Europe, leading to a wholly false notion that Britain had somehow lost the secret of its former greatness. Corporatism was seen as being to blame – whereas in fact Britain would have been far worse off if it had carried on with classic capitalism. Corporatism was in fact the best available option, but too few people knew it at the time. And the ‘shareholder’s revolt’ led by people like Goldsmith has produced a truly revolting alternative!

***

Goldsmith’s notion of a ‘trap’ springs from the same financier / accountant viewpoint that has been so bad for British industry. If life was about nothing but money, then cutting wages would indeed be always good for industry, and the society with the lowest wages would put everyone else out of business. But life is not about money. Money determines the distribution of wealth within a society, obviously. But its role in determining overall prosperity is another matter.

“Economists know surprisingly little about the causes of economic growth. Although fast-growing countries have many things in common, economists do not know which of these actually cause growth and which are simply byproducts of it.” (The Economist, September 30th 1995, p 132).

This interesting insight is of course buried in the highly technical Finance and Economics section. Facts that are well known when it comes to advising the rich on investment possibilities have no influence on the loud-mouthed main-editorial view that growth comes from letting the money men do just as they please.

In my view, money is meaningful only because it reflects the overall wealth of the society. It is a convenient means of distribution and control. But ‘making money’ is not at all the same thing as making wealth for the common benefit.

When England first grew as an industrial nation in the 18th century, wages for ordinary labourers kept pace with the rising prosperity. The sudden sharp decline that occurred with widespread mechanisation and de-skilling was certainly very nice for a burgeoning class of factory-owners. Not so good for the society as a whole. Quite horrible for all of the small property owners and craftspeople, who found themselves wiped out by social movements as arbitrary and beyond their control as earthquakes or volcanoes.

These events were not outside of the control of the ruling class. Few people were against change as such – they just objected when it was for someone else’s benefit and at their expense. The simple action of accepting existing skilled production or small-scale distribution as a form of property would have ensured gentler and less disruptive changes. Social controls were strictly enforced where the interests of rich well-connected people were involved – a fortune was paid to wealthy landowners for allowing railways to be run across their land, for instance. But when the ‘small men’ asked that their own skills and social position be treated as a form of property not subject to arbitrary confiscation, this viewpoint was mostly ignored.

Some people call the brutal extinction of traditional social forms part of the ‘price of progress’. I am far from sure it was. Since we today are a population of people who were produced by the breakdown of eighteenth century forms, we may perhaps decide that the changes were a Good Thing. But that is quite different from saying that they were necessary or that some other pattern of development might not also have worked.

Victorian industry seemed amazing because it was the only industrial society in the whole world. But by modern standards it was a decidedly sluggish and unsuccessful economy, growing about half as fast as Britain did in the ‘disastrous’ post-1945 years. Letting the poor sink to the lowest sustainable level of misery served the immediate interest of the rich. It saved them the direct expense that would have come with social responsibility. But this callous self-righteous greed also ensured that Britain would not in the long run retain its early advantage.

During the 19th century, America matched and then surpassed Great Britain – but not by being a poor low-wage economy. American wage-rates were in fact about double the British equivalent. American culture valued labour as well as private enterprise – hence institutions like ‘Labour Day’, celebrated since 1895 an American public holiday. Unlike May Day, Labour Day involved the whole of the society celebrating the importance of skilled work. This no longer really holds, unfortunately, with the Republicans having become an American Tory Party and money becoming the only social value. But in the days when the USA was going up in the world, high wages and respect for ordinary workers was part of the mix.

Germany was another case that shows just how wrong Goldsmith is. Germany under Bismark became an industrial giant while giving the working class an unprecedented package of welfare and social security. And Japan during its rise to greatness gave its ordinary employees rights and security that Western experts regarded as ruinous. The issues are complex, and there may be some short-term advantages in wage cutting. But the most common pattern found over the past couple of centuries is for the society with the highest wages to be ruining everyone else.

Britain’s best ever period for growth was the 1950s and 1960s, when wages were growing unprecedentedly fast. Britain back then was averaging 2.5% annual growth, better than anything that Thatcher or Major have managed, and more than twice as good as the ‘good old days’ of Victorian Britain. Victorian industry was slow and chaotic by modern standards: it looked impressive only in a world when any sort of industrial society was a startling novelty.

If it were low wages that made foreign competition dangerous, the main threat would be coming from Africa rather than East Asia. But wages are usually a minor factor, and only an incompetent management or managerial class will be wanting to lower them. Any idiot boss can grow rich by squeezing money out of their poor and vulnerable fellow-citizens. A good industrialist will do exactly the reverse.

Henry Ford swept the board with his Model-T small motor-cars while paying his workers twice the going rate for American industry, itself generous compared to Britain. And all of the successful Asian societies have been careful to look after their working mainstream, however unfair or unreasonable they may have been in other ways.

Japan has prospered because it had a more productive and successful system of human relationships in industry. There was much less of a them-and-us culture than in Britain. There was sensible central state direction. And there was a business culture that normally prevented characters like Goldsmith from messing up productive industries with complex money games that benefited only themselves.

Very few people see their own way of life as wrong. Al Capone didn’t – he did genuinely see himself as a splendid fellow providing a useful public service. How much the more complacent must Goldsmith feel about his own activities, which are after all quite legal, and highly applauded in some circles. One suspects that even Private Eye would have found nothing to complain about if exactly the same career of high-stake gambling had been pursued by one of their friends. So although Goldsmith is highly symptomatic of what’s wrong with Britain – as are Private Eye, in their own way – he must find some other sort of person to dump the blame on.

It is hard to go on condemning the unions after their visible loss of power. Hard to blame management for not being subservient enough to shareholder interests, since all of them have learned that lesson, and also discovered the benefits of share options. Quite impossible after the events of the last few years to keep declaiming that the Soviet Union is a new Rome destined to destroy the free-trading Western ‘Carthage’. Someone else must be found to be very guilty indeed of all of the failings that Goldsmith and similar financial games-players cannot possibly be responsible for. East Asia and the European Union makes logical and a popular targets.

***

Sir James Goldsmith is a turkey campaigning for an early Christmas. He has done very well for himself in the peaceful tolerant and prosperous Europe of the last few decades. But he’s a businessman, accustomed to focus very narrowly on his own immediate concerns, ignorant of other forms of human activity. He doesn’t understand that this favourable environment is both artificial and vulnerable. The product of much care and idealism. A deliberately crafted alternative to the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. All he can see is the expense. He mistakes the price of civilisation for a wasteful frivolity.

His recent literary offering, The Trap, looks more like an overgrown interview than a book. He may be a financial genius, but he is a bigoted fool about everything else. He amply demonstrates that you don’t have to be smart to get rich: just skilful and lucky in the complex games that make up the modern financial world.

The man has no intellectual depths, and not even very much to say. The Trap uses big print to weigh in at just over 200 pages. Much of this is a tedious rant on food hygiene and nuclear safety, subjects that have already been well covered by many other writers. Apart from this, one has some semblance of a political philosophy, a right-wing protest at current developments in Europe. But though his political thinking is weak and muddled, Goldsmith has to be taken seriously. He is a notable representative of a small but growing force on the French Right, perhaps a worse menace than the obvious malice of Le Pen. If things get bad, politics might go almost any way, including Goldsmith’s way. And he is now trying the same stunt over here, offering to field his own candidates in the next election. He may not do any better than the ‘natural law party’, who were at least nice in their eccentricity. But in the current political uncertainly, someone with Goldsmith’s money and brash self-confidence cannot be written off as marginal.

The European Union is not safe or stable. It must keep going forward, or else perhaps die. The Maastricht framework is necessary to keep the divergent national interests within reasonable bounds.

The rapid slide of Yugoslavia from peaceful prosperity into a war-zone shows just how fast things can fall apart. Central controlling power may seem like a burden and an intrusion – but just see what happens when it is not there! James Goldsmith should be all for Maastricht and welfarism. Instead he has a dogmatic right-wing hatred for both. He even engages in some nasty ranting against non-white immigrants.

The Goldsmith family were originally Goldschmidts from Frankfurt. His father Frank Goldsmith seemed to have integrated perfectly, getting elected as an English MP while still quite a young man. But he was caught by the hysterical anti-German feeling of World War One, and rapidly lost his position and trust. Much as happened in the same period to the Battenbergs, now Mountbattens, despite their royal connections. The less-well-connected Frank Goldsmith found it necessary to abandon England and start a new career as a hotel manager in France.

Having had to flee England in World War One because of their German origin, the Goldsmiths had to flee back there in World War Two because they were Jews. All of which should have given Sir James some sensitivity to the plight of the displaced and dispossessed. But it does not. Empathy is perhaps not his strong point. Nor does he show the least inkling of the dangerous nature of the forces he is trying to stir up.

‘Britishness’ is a concept developed in the 16th century by courtiers and thinkers of Welsh origin, who had risen within the English state as followers of the part-Welsh Tudor dynasty. Wales was legally and administratively swallowed up by England in the Middle Ages. But then one had the unexpected rise of the Tudor family to the English throne, after most other candidates had killed each other off in the Wars of the Roses.

The Welsh families who followed the Tudors did not question that England had successfully swallowed their nation. There was too much brute power in the matter to make it a sensible topic for debate. But they also wished to keep their own identity. So they revived the Roman concept of ‘Britannia’. The same concept was used again by James the Sixth of Scotland when he became James the First of England. He reckoned himself the ruler of ‘Great Britain’, though a formal union took a lot longer. There were many conflicts between ‘North Briton’ and ‘South Briton’. And even the radical libertarian anti-establishment politics of John Wilkes included a strong and disgraceful element of anti-Scotch bigotry.

Despite this, Britishness was a wide concept that could include a great many diverse peoples. But in times of stress, the definition of ‘Britishness’ could also be drastically contracted, as Frank Goldsmith found.

The fact that Britain is relatively tolerant at this present time does not mean that it will always remain so. A strong reassertion of purely English bigotry is a danger that any sensible person would want to guard against. Sir James Goldsmith is very definitely not a sensible person.

Hostility to one sort of ‘foreigner’ can easily get extended beyond what the original leader wants. The political career of John Wilkes was effectively ended by the Gordon Riots of 1780. In part, the rioters were supporting the rebellious American colonies. The whole struggle for American independence was referred to as the Civil War by many of Wilkes’s supporters, heirs to the Cromwellian tradition. At one level the Gordon Riots were a fine protest for simple democracy, and the rioters’ destruction of Newgate Prison foreshadowing the later fall of the Bastille. But the Gordon Riot was also disfigured by a vicious anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry. Many of Wilkes’s supporters were also heirs to the Cromwellian tradition in their view of Irish Catholics. Wilkes himself felt obliged to help suppress rioting crowds who included many who had voted for him across the years. And Edmund Burke, a target of the rioters even though he was officially Church of England, probably gained his mistrust of the ‘swinish multitude’ at this time.

The whole mess was a foreseeable result of Wilkes unwisely deciding to make use of anti-Scotch bigotry to get at his anti-democratic Scottish foes. It set back progressive politics and delayed Catholic emancipation for maybe a couple of generations. It as probably the reason why Catholic Ireland became fervent supporters of Papal Power instead of joining the radical ‘Celtic Fringe’. Yet could easily have been far worse. There were some little-documented struggles within Radicalism over the next couple of generations.

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that religious and national bigotry would be definitely pushed out of the popular movement for democracy. In the USA it never really was. Populism blends easily into racism and right-wing Christian extremism, which is why US politics remain such a mess and keeps throwing up characters like Buchanan. Even over here, the radical-right viewpoint has never been totally excluded, though there have been no more set-backs like the Gordon Riots.

***

In the world of today, the European Union offers a way of ending the bitterness of centuries. A way to end the interminable conflict of nation-states and the persecution of inconvenient minorities. But a viable Europe would have to be a Europe based on all of its present inhabitants, without engaging in the dangerous game of trying to decide which portion of the present population really belongs.

According to Goldsmith, “The principle purpose of Europe’s defence must be to protect Europe’s vital interests… to defend its territory against military or uncontrolled invasion”. (The Trap, p 71.) Asked what he means by ‘uncontrolled invasion’, he says ‘I mean immigration on a scale which cannot be integrated.’ Which is quite different from illegal immigration, and a rather dangerous principle to float. Adolf Hitler when he began to drive out the Jews could have said with great sincerity that he was merely dealing with people who could not be integrated.

The encouragement of mass Commonwealth immigration to Britain in the 1950s was foolish, a crazy policy based on false expectations of a labour shortage. But it was an error made by the whole society. Characters like Enoch Powell suppose that we can somehow push out people who came here quite legally and in accordance with government policies. This is simply unjust, and also foolish, since it could not be done by any method that even someone like Powell could stomach. Powell has talked vaguely of ‘voluntary repatriation’, which is politically meaningless. British law does not prevent any of its existing inhabitants from going off somewhere else, but very few of Britain’s black minority wish to leave. Some of the untroublesome older people may chose to retire to the land of their birth. But the British-born youngsters have been very effectively incorporated into British society. Short of some Bosnia-style ‘ethnic cleansing’, they are no more likely to depart than any other portion of the society.

People who are legally and actually part of Britishness have to be accommodated somehow. Most of the non-white population is British-born and unlikely to fit in anywhere else. And many of the original arrivals already possessed substantial long-standing connections with Britain. Connections through the Imperial structures which gave London its current standing as a world financial standing. Whatever people say, there is black in the Union Jack.

The eighteenth century prosperity that allowed Britain to launch modern industrial society was built on imperial wealth. Bombay, Madrid and Calcutta were shaped by Britain’s gradual incorporation of the sub-continent into its Empire. The West Indies were even more a British creation. The original American Indian populations had been wiped out by the Spaniards: something totally new was created by Western Europe’s demand for tropical products, especially sugar. The English-speaking islands are societies that Britain invented from scratch, with much of the population intentionally placed there as slaves or indentured workers. To now pretend that they have nothing to do with us is ridiculous, unjust and unworkable.

There are many ways to define British or American identities. Some would exclude people of Irish origin or Jewish origin or anyone with a darker skin. Others would exclude just Jewish and Black – the concept of Anglo-Celtic is presently quite popular in the USA. And there are those – including some right-wing Jews – who hope to limit the exclusion to just Blacks. Goldsmith gives every sign of holding to this last opinion. He sees the United States as being threatened because soon “the average US resident, as defined by census statistics, will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific islands, Arabia – almost anywhere but white Europe.” (Ibid, p 61.) Of course the typical defenders of ‘white Europe’ also have a way of being anti-Jewish. [Which is one of several reasons why they have achieved very little beyond hooliganism.]

Goldsmith may suppose that he can whip up fear, hatred and chauvinism without it ever getting beyond what he would see as its proper boundaries. Wilkes may have felt the same, in his heyday.

The USA decided from the very start to define itself by citizenship, not race or religion. A certain amount of cultural assimilation was required for the foreign-born: that was all. There was of course a strong unofficial bias towards both Christians and North Europeans. Few were so racist as to entirely exclude Hispanics from the category of ‘white Europe’, as Goldsmith does. The big and still unresolved problem was the descendants of the black slaves who were brought in because they were much more profitable than free white labour.

Afro-Americans have always been placed at the very bottom of every hierarchy. They were never truly allowed to be part of the society. The brief attempt at inclusion in the 1960s seems to have failed. People who could not stomach open racial segregation also balked at the costs and problems of true integration. Afro-Americans were left half in and half out of the society.

The Republican Party are now taking over the American South by irresponsibly tapping deep reservoirs of racism. Unlike the old-time Democrats, they do not offer a serious schema for a racist society. Unlike the present-day Democrats, and unlike the Nationalist Party in South Africa, they do not recognise that the racist game is up and that serious reforms are needed for long-term stability. The ‘conservative’ Republicans make use of racists and seem to care nothing for the long-term results.

Anglo-Celtic America needs to be told that that the present set-up is unjust and unworkable. But Goldsmith’s remarks on President Madison endorse the exclusion of America’s Black minority.

“James Madison … though he himself was a slave owner, he believed in emancipation. But he understood that the slaves had been stripped of their culture and that they would be excluded from, or would reject, the prevalent white culture… Prior to the arrival of African Americans, America’s immigrant population seemed likely to develop into a nation… They commingled with ease… Obviously, for all the reasons foreseen by Madison, the relations between African and European Americans was very much more difficult.” (Ibid, 57 – 59).

To say ‘would be excluded from, or would reject’ is remarkably mealy-mouthed. Black separatism has usually been a marginal force. It was only ever an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. Black Americans tried for a very long time to be what the rest of the society wanted them to be. The trouble was, the rest of the society mostly wanted them not to be black. Most white Americans just would not accept a full common identity with people of a darker skin-colour, no matter how similar their culture. Whole waves of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans had been absorbed with remarkably little fuss. But faith in the American ‘melting pot’ faded away very rapidly when the Civil Rights movement established that Afro-Americans would have be a part of it.

Black American culture is the most purely and specifically American of all the elements in US life. Links with Black Africa are mostly forgotten, playing a smaller role than Greek or Roman legacies play in English identity. Also Black Africa contained peoples as different from each other as Danes, Poles, French, Germans and English. The slaves took their culture from their owners, and developed it in response to what the society expected of them. They also succumbed to commercialisation faster than other peoples who had more confidence in their origins and more status within the society. But though Afro-Americans were always moving in tune with the society, anticipating some trends, originated almost all of the music that America then spread to the rest of the world, they were always kept at a distance.

The US Constitution was based on abstractions. It ignored the national and religious and racial distinctions that had been normal in all previous republics. Though implicitly accepting some sort of Creator, it says nothing definite about either God or Religion. All it does is to make it illegal for any particular religion to be established as the foundation of the state.

That was the theory. The vast numerical preponderance of Protestant Christians gave a very definite character to the society. The Constitution defined it as ‘Abstract-land’, but in practice it was ‘WASP-land’, a new nation created by and for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The presence of Jews was accepted, as it had been in the countries the settlers had come from. Yet Jews were not quite seen as full members of the community, despite theoretical legal equality. They were perhaps one rung down from WASPS, certainly well above Mexicans or Blacks, not targeted for genocide like the Red Indians, but also not quite equal.

Jews in the USA mostly shared the prejudices of their neighbours. Southern Jews quoted Hebrew scriptures that justified slavery. Northern Jews supported emancipation but not integration. Jews used blacks as convenient cheap labour just like everyone else. Groups like the Quakers had their own distinctive agenda, helping escaped slaves and treating the native Americans as fellow-humans. But the majority of Jews accepted the prejudices of their neighbours on all matters except their own status as Jews. Much the same was also true in Britain, and seems not be extinct even today. Since mainstream Toryism has been seriously opposed to anti-Semitism in a way that present-day Republicanism is not, Jews tend to be distributed right across the political spectrum. Sir Keith Joseph was Thatcher’s teacher and mentor. British Jews “are politically more right-wing than the general population but when allowances are made for social class, Jews of all religious affiliations are found to be well to the left of gentiles in the same profession.” (The Independent, 15th February 1996.) Also “Jews believe that racism has increased more over the last five years than anti-Semitism”. But that has been after a fairly minor economic crisis, in which many are stressed but few are desperate. The fact that British Jews are less inclined to share to smug greed of English middle-class professionals indicates that memory lingers still.

[admin]

Part 2 of 2

***

Modern Cosmopolitanism was invented by West Europeans whose ancestors would have been Christian for more than a thousand years, and pagans before that. (As were mine, though my own direct ancestors would still have been submerged in the peasantry back then.) By the 18th century, the educated classes had had quite enough of conventional Christianity. The horrors done in the name of the Bible during the Wars of Religion discredited the existing sources of spiritual authority. They looked to make a new and rational world in which they hoped such things could not happen again.

Educated people turned to pure reason, because ‘spirituality’ as actually practised in Western Europe had been so thoroughly disastrous.

The Enlightenment was a covert rejection of popular faith by most of the rulers and thinkers. Some were ‘Latitudinarian’, believing that Christianity had been originally an Enlightened creed that had somehow been distorted over the centuries. This view had as good a justification as the more popular Puritan or Roman Catholic interpretations. All three creeds could make use of some parts of the Bible while being obliged to distort or ignore much else. But the Enlightenment also included the more logical and subversive creed of Deism, which believed in a creator-God but denied any special status to Jesus or to the ‘Holy Scriptures’.

From either a Latitudinarian or a Deist viewpoint, Jews settling in Britain were not a problem. Even from a serious Protestant viewpoint it made sense, since Jews had been viciously persecuted by England’s old enemy Spain. A Jewish presence in England was officially authorised under Cromwell, following a very serious debate as to whether the Mediaeval prohibition against them should be lifted. The advice of the legal experts was that there was no actual law preventing Jews from settling in England. The original expulsion had been done by the authority of the Crown without any specific Act of Parliament. Cromwell as the inheritor of Royal power was quite entitled to take a different view of the matter. And since Charles the Second chose to take the same view, it ceased to be much of an issueJews in Britain had a place similar to some of the less conventional Nonconformist groups. The dominant Church of England viewpoint often lumped them all together. In Smollet’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, it is said of one of the characters that “though she is a violent church-woman… I believe in my conscience she would have no objection, at present, to treat on the score of matrimony with an Anabaptist, Quaker, or Jew, and even ratify the treaty with her own conversion.”

Real-life conversions did occur, and caused no particular stir. When Lord Gordon who had caused the Gordon riots with his Protestant zeal later converted to an obscure and unrespectable sect of Judaism, this was seen as just another oddity from a very odd man.

Jews fitted in nicely on the fringes of British life, only gradually gaining full citizenship as the privileges of the Church of England were slowly eroded. Both Jews and Nonconformists would pioneer new methods and create new trade connections, and might become very wealthy. Neither group had full political rights, which were originally confined to people who were at least nominally members of the Church of England. Conversion and assimilation were welcomed, but not required or imposed. Both individual Jews and individual Nonconformists might well switch to the Church of England as they grew wealthy and moved up the social ladder. But in both groups, there were also notable and determined hold-outs.

It was only quite late in the 19th century that all religious restrictions in British political life were swept away. This was done first for Nonconformists, whose basic loyalty to the state was felt to be secure after 1688. Rather more slowly for Catholics, who were being officially urged to treason by the Church Hierarchy. Last of all for Jews, even though they had always passively accepted whatever state structure they found themselves under, because the official basis of the state remained Christian.

Jews were in fact accommodated under a set of reforms that removed all religious requirements – reforms that were mostly of benefit to ex-Christians who disliked having to pretend to beliefs they had long abandoned. It would have been quite possible to draw up a list of ‘acceptable’ creeds or religions, requiring people in public life to adhere to one or other of them. Just as legislation to impose the strict Protestant interpretation of what was acceptable on Sunday did make provision for Jews keeping their Sabbath instead. But what actually happened was that everyone without exception was released from any particular religious obligation, with religion turned into a personal matter. Formally speaking the state remains Anglican, with the proviso that the monarch must be a member of the Church of England, the church of which he or she remains the titular head. By the same logic, the Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords. But for all practical purposes, the state is now secular. The Enlightenment or Cosmopolitical world view was happy to let Europe’s Jews exist as a distinct community, not excluded and not unreasonably pressured to give up their separate identity. So successful was this policy, and so successful were individual Jews at flourishing within this framework, that there has been a false and highly confusing identification of Judaism and the Cosmopolitical world view.

The totally indigenous nature of the Enlightenment gets overlooked. The only significant Jewish input was the philosophical ideas of Spinoza. And Baruch Spinoza had an historic importance only because a few Enlightenment thinkers chose to take notice of him after his own Jewish community had expelled him as a heretic.

The version of Judaism that developed after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem was a moderate and a modest religion. But in no sense was it Cosmopolitan. It remained politely outside the Cosmopolitical schemes of the later Roman Emperors, just as it had with the earlier Hellenistic empires. Whereas both Christians and Muslims wished ideally to include the entire human race within their own creed, Jews wished mostly to continue just as they were.

In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas had become the norm – even the Holy Alliance was a reactionary expression of those same values. Jews adapted to the new environment, just as they had always previously taken account of the twists and turns of whatever society they were operating within. But Jewish and Christian mental worlds had been essentially separate throughout the centuries when the peoples were physically intermingled, keeping up most of the barriers that had been erected when Christianity separated itself from Judaism within the pagan Roman Empire.

When Jews and Christians co-existed in mediaeval Europe, there was little cross-over. A work of Jewish theology that pondered the nature of God got accidentally included among the acceptable books of mediaeval Catholicism. Protestants looked to Jewish versions of the Hebrew Bible to get rid of textual corruptions. But the essential separateness remained. It was the Enlightenment framework that gave scope for Jews become part of a common Cosmopolitical framework of European thought.

During the 19th century, there were many and notable contributions to the continuing Enlightenment by Jews or by persons of Jewish origin. And a certain confusion grew up as to where these ideas had originally come from. Cosmopolitical ideas came to be identified as Jewish, which is simply untrue. This view was mostly associated with right-wing Catholicism, keen to identify the revolt against its own power as having alien roots, not a natural result of its own mismanagement and cynical power-politics.

The Enlightenment was entirely a revolt within the framework of Christian society. Jews took little part in it, not until after it had become the European norm. Voltaire and Diderot were both educated by Jesuits. Their British equivalents came from strongly Protestant tradition, the heirs of Cromwell, the people who had gone looking for truth in the Bible in protest against Rome’s excessive claims. Unfortunately, it turned out that while the actual text of the Bible discredited many Catholic traditions, it didn’t really justify Protestantism either. Devout Protestants and educated Catholics both found themselves faced with popular beliefs that they could not easily change but did not have much regard for. Both groups found themselves converging on a ‘Enlightened’ viewpoint, a decision that none of the established forms of Christianity could be considered either true or worthy of preservation.

***

I said earlier that Jews and the less conventional Nonconformists tended to be lumped together in the eyes of the Church of England mainstream. But in their own eyes, there was a very great difference. Jews continued to see themselves as ‘strangers in a strange land’. They might keep themselves separate from the rest of the society. Or they might try to integrate with it. But they had very little notion of trying to alter it.

Nonconformists were something quite different, strangers in their own land. Survivals of the alternative vision of Britishness that had overthrown Charles the First in the Civil War and yet somehow failed to consolidate itself under Cromwell. A hold-out against the Enlightenment view that the Bible was not the place to go looking for truth. They certainly never saw their defeat as final. Nor were they worried at whom they might upset or enrage, just so long as they were righteous in their own eyes.

Nonconformists in Britain and America pioneered a disruptive unprecedented and unpopular industrialism. They continued to struggle with the gentry for control of the levers of political and social power. They provided a disproportionate number of both the early capitalists and the early radical democrats.

Regarding Socialism, I think that Marx was the first person of Jewish origin to make a substantial contribution to a system of thought that had been growing within Europe for decades. And this was only because he was highly assimilated, the son of a convert to Protestantism, not at all comfortable with his Jewishness. He made his own enormous contributions to human thought within what was already a strong and growing political movement.

In as far as modern socialism can be given a specific origin, it begins with the Spenceans, a British movement that was a logical continuation of Nonconformist concern for social justice and equality.

Jews as a segregated self-separating self-obsessed minority would never ever have produced such a thing as the Enlightenment, no matter how much they later contributed to it. One can of course find ‘Enlightened’ ideas within the traditional framework, mixed up with all of the peculiar old customs and relics of bronze-age superstitions. This was indeed also true for most of the world’s other religions- some schools of Islamic thought verged on Atheism, and forms of philosophical skepticism and atheism also flourished within the vast framework of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Indeed, it was only in the rival traditions of West European Latin Christianity and its Protestant offshoot that Enlightened ideas got squeezed out and had to start fighting on their own account.

Mediaeval Catholicism allowed a broad spectrum of thought. Many of the later mediaeval popes were not really Christian, tending to Deism or Scepticism or even Atheism. The Reformation tried to be and in many cases actually was a deeply conservative movement, a removal of the alien incursions of centuries. But when Catholicism finally accepted the need to ‘clean up its act’, it did so in a a way that made it almost impossible for moderate Protestants to be reconciled to it. The Council of Trent insisted that lunatic ideas like Transubstantiation, near-deification of the Virgin Mary and huge powers for the Vatican Hierarchy were made it certain that the differences within one single branch of the Christian faith could only be resolved by war.

If the Council of Trent had been able to reconcile moderate Protestant to a reformed and moderate Catholicism, there would probably have been no Enlightenment. Likewise if they had managed the military conquest of Protestant Europe, as very nearly happened several times. But by the 18th century there was stalemate, a peace that seemed to have very little to do with God. The Enlightenment grew among dissident Christians and ex-Christians, people who very reasonably appalled by what official religion had done.

If official religion was no longer seen as a source of either wisdom or virtue, then there was little reason to impose putative restrictions on those who had refused to conform to it. Christian Europe had in any case always had confused mixed feeling about its Jews, the people who were the heroes of its own Old Testament. Every other non-Christian minority was suppressed and wiped out, with a thoroughness and a ferocity that made people almost forget that Europe had ever been anything but Christian. Only the Jewish minority was allowed a marginal but definite existence. And with the Enlightenment, there was no longer any good reason to keep them marginal.

This contribution of 19th century Jews to the Enlightenment was also part of the assimilation of a previously impervious minority within European society. Conventional Christianity demanded the surrender of Jewish identity as the price for full membership of the society. The Enlightenment let everyone find their own level, and keep as much or as little of their separate identity as they saw fit.

The US wrote its constitution on the basis of the Enlightenment or Cosmopolitical world view, and with an intention of limiting the power of government. This led to a political system seriously out of tune with the actual beliefs of the vast majority of the population. Covert ways were found to exclude non-whites, Afro-Americans in particular, despite their theoretical legal equality. Inevitably, most of actual social practice was full of hypocrisy and self-righteous evasiveness. The letter of the law is in flat contradiction with the general assumption that the USA is a Christian country.

Most Jews in America have understood and supported the Cosmopolitical view, either from idealism or from a sensible recognition of their own long-term interest. Likewise in Europe, the creation of effective Cosmopolitical structures will benefit everyone, but should be of particularly strong interest to those who do not fit in definitely with any one nation. No one is currently expecting Sir James to say ‘ich bien ein Frankfurter’. The singular German, Jewish, French and English roots of the Goldschmidts of Frankfurt were not a problem in the relatively humane Europe that existed before the First World War . They are not currently a problem in a Europe where old antagonism are transformed into democratic Cosmopolitical politics. But Goldsmith himself is working busily to weaken that structure, with a blissful unawareness of the horrors that may be unleashed if it were ever to break down.

***

Goldsmith quite frequently shows an encyclopaedic ignorance. He can not be bothered to correct simple misunderstandings that a quick look in any decent encyclopaedia would correct. Nor does he seem to have anyone working for him who could do so. He blames the US intervention in Somalia for the collapse of Somali society, which had already occurred before they got there (p 53). He also attributes Free Trade to David Ricardo (p 15), whereas any decent reference work would have told him that Ricardo’s main work was an integrated theory of value, wages, profits and rents. Concerning Free Trade, Ricardo had little to add, apart from pioneering opposition to the Corn Laws. The man himself says that ‘the injurious effects of the mercantile system have been fully exposed by Dr. Smith. (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter XXII.) Smith had actually just asserted this as a dogma set amidst a serious analysis of many other economic matters – but that’s a topic for another article.

The point to note is that Goldsmith will talk as if he knows it all, even when he is really quite ignorant. It is a quality that must have helped make him a grand business success – a brashly confident and aggressive person will end up either rich or bankrupt. Interesting enough, Goldsmith did go bankrupt once, quite early in his career. Eventually, to cheer himself up, he decided to go out to lunch:

“At a corner kiosk I bought the Paris-Presse, to see if my bankruptcy had made the newspapers,” he remembers. “But when I opened it the first thing I saw were big headlines saying ‘BANK STRIKE’. I couldn’t believe it.

“For the first time in twenty years the staff of every French bank had decided to go on strike. Not a single one had opened that morning, and – more important still – not a single bill had been presented for payment. Jimmy Goldsmith was not bankrupt; at least not for the moment.” (Tycoon: the life of James Goldsmith, by Geoffrey Wansell. Grafton Books 1987, p 16.)

This gave him time to put together a deal and save himself, so that he became a famous billionaire rather than a forgotten failure.

People like to think that there is some ‘X-plus’ factor that helps make the successful people successful. They are the ‘winners’, and always destined to win. The others are ‘losers’, whose failure is a quite deserved punishment for their own inadequacy. And since it is only possible to tell the ‘winners’ from the ‘losers’ by the fact that one sort win and the other sort lose, this view of the world is wonderfully immune from factual disproof.

Supposing that one were to persuade a large group of men to play ‘Russian roulette’ as many as six times each, each time using a fresh gun. All of them would have been foolish, but some of them would end up as survivors. Looking at it in individual terms, each man might count his survival as miraculous. But statistics predict that there would be survivors, a surprisingly large number of survivors, fully one third of the original group. If you find this number puzzling, remember that each round is likely to eliminate one-sixth of the survivors, and not one-sixth of the original number, as would happen if they all went on using the same guns. And you can also verify it by rolling a dice, counting one as death.

One could go further. Supposing one got a few thousand gamblers to agree to play Russian Roulette a full twenty-five times. Each would have a very low chance of individual survival – about one in a hundred, I think. But if a few thousand gamblers try it, then simple statistics would tell you that a few dozen would succeed. For each of them individually, it might seem miraculous. But for the group this is just what one would expect. If a large number of people take foolish chances, some of them are bound to get away with it. Their achievements will look rather special and miraculous only to those who forget about all of the corresponding failures.

Goldsmith’s career has included many errors, errors which finished off many similar men but which happened to rebound to his benefit. Surprisingly, it turns out that this scion of old well-connected German-Jewish banking circles had a completely false idea of what he was taking on in his battle with Private Eye:

“The magazine epitomised the worst features of English society, he believed, and he had the financial power to defeat it. What had begun as a battle to protect himself, and one of his solicitors, Eric Levine, from libel, had quickly escalated into a crusade, taking a great deal of his time and energy.’ It was also a crusade which he could not hope to win. ‘The magazine was a club of British journalists, and I did not realise the importance of what I was handling! I did not realise that Private Eye was part of the whole British press.’ It was a telling naivete.’ Ibid, p 235) However ”’The case against the Eye made me richer than I ever dreamed of’, he explains now, ‘because by going private at the bottom of the market, and buying my shares when they were cheap, meant that instead of having a huge empire, in which I had only a percentage, I ended up owning the whole thing.

”By forcing Jimmy Goldsmith so mercilessly into the public eye, the magazine had also contrived to make sure that instead of simply being a financier who had built an empire but ended up owning only a tiny portion of it himself, he had become its principal owner. ‘If the case hadn’t happened I’d have built a huge empire, been a notable, but I wouldn’t have been a capitalist. I was forced to be a capitalist. The decision to go into Slater Walker, which led to the Eye, turned me from being the head of a company into being rich. It’s odd.'” (Ibid, p 257).

Viewing matters in this light, I see no reason to be overawed by the success of Jimmy Goldsmith. He’s not all that different from the people who become multi-millionaires through the football pools or National Lottery. In a growing and speculative economy, a few of the ambitious and risk-taking young men are bound to end up fabulously wealthy. Though some of the ‘losers’ will be incompetents who were never likely to get anywhere, most success or failure rests on sheer luck.

***

Goldsmith shows an astonishing ignorance and prejudice on the complex matter of Eastern Europe’s numerous overlapping and variously entangled nationalities. Thus:

“The Czechs and the Slovaks are two nations which in 1918 were forced into a single state, Czechoslovakia. As soon as they became free after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they discarded their artificial union and peacefully divorced.” (The Trap, p 50).

The real history is that these two very similar people chose to live in a single state as soon as they were free from German and Hungarian domination. There were always tensions and rivalries, as there are between English and Scotch. But the similarities were usually more important. Hitler separated them, incorporating the Czech part into Germany, but they got back together again after his downfall. During the whole long period of Soviet domination they worked together – Alexander Dubchek was a Slovak, after all, and his autobiography Hope Dies Last gives an excellent guide to the complexities. After 1989, there was still little desire for separation. But then the Slovaks followed the trend in the rest of Eastern Europe in electing reformed Communists after they had seen the Thatcher-worshipping free-marketeers in action. The Czechs took a different line. Incompatible politics and economics broke up a union that both sides would have preferred to keep.

Despite being a man of Anglo-French background and German-Jewish origins, Goldsmith has a dogmatically simple approach to nations. It is as if he saw each nation as having been created by God, complete with is own garden walls. The unpleasant and potentially explosive problem of overlapping nationalities is just ignored. Most people understand that Nelson Mandela is performing a delicate balancing-act between a great diversity of factional and intermixed racial and tribal groups. But for Goldsmith, “they back the Xhosa nation to dominate all others. We are witnessing an attempt to form another Yugoslavia.” (Ibid, p 52.)

Was Yugoslavia such a bad thing? Given the intermixing and overlap of the Southern Slavs, the choice was Yugoslavia or ‘ethnic cleansing’. In the post-1989 euphoria, Western Europe blundered and backed the dismemberment of a state that had more or less kept the peace. And it was all done messily. The rights of Muslim Albanians within Serbia have simply been ignored. The rights of majority-Serb populations in the various other administrative units of former Yugoslavia were neither definitely affirmed nor definitely rejected. A Bosnian Muslim factional leadership with no real understanding of politics was allowed to set itself up as a sovereign government with theoretically unlimited rights over Bosnian Serbs, who had been the majority before the World War Two massacres when Muslims and Croats were Nazi auxiliaries. The matter is now being settled by war rather than law, with the USA currently ready to give the Bosnian Serbs a large chunk of what they originally took up arms for.

In South Africa, if Mandela can not hold things together, I doubt if anyone else can. And I doubt if any other simple or stable pattern could be found. For Southern Africa does not consist of distinct nations with clear and accepted national territories. The various peoples overlap and are intermingled; sovereign nations could only be established by massive ‘ethnic cleansing’. And it is uncertain if Zulus could even co-exist with their fellow-Zulus, outside of the larger framework of a multi-ethnic state. The mighty Shaka was murdered by his relatives, after all.

In Western Europe, Britishness and Irishness are still at odds in Ulster. The French and Germans formed the European Community, because the likely alternative was yet another war over an ambiguous border that had been moving back and forth ever since the days of Charlemagne. To the East, Germany could make an exhalant claim to chunks of what is now Poland. Poland has its own claims on its smaller neighbours further east. Hungary is concerned about local majorities of ethnic Hungarians in territories that have been part of Hungary within living memory.

Goldsmith understands none of this. He complains that “The European Unions was built in secret” (p 64), by which he means that some power has passed from the Council of Ministers to the Commission. But how else could Europe work? In the Council of Ministers, each individual fights for the particular interests of their own nation. In the European Union, Commissioners appointed by the various governments try to find a common European interest in one particular area of responsibility.

The Trap contrasts ministers, “elected national heads of state or their representatives”, with the “technocrats of the Commission”. Now I have no great personal regard for Commissioners like Leon Britten or Neil Kinnock. But the former was a senior minister at a time when the Tories had substantial popular support. The latter only just missed becoming British Prime Minister, and would certainly have won if people had had an inkling of how Major would really turn out. Even Delors, arch-Eurocrat, would have had a sporting chance of becoming the popularly-elected President of France had he chosen to risk it.

“As for the European Parliament, it is a pseudo-democratic institution. It is totally dominated by two major parties, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, both of which share with the European Commission the vision of supranational, centralized European state dominating a homogenised union. Its only real function is to provide cover for the Commission.” (p 73).

Goldsmith seems of have picked up some Trotskyite jargon form somewhere. I’ve no idea how, but lapsed Trotskyists can end up almost anywhere. ‘Pseudo-democratic’ is Trot-speak for any expression of popular will that is contrary to their own hopes and expectations.

Socialists and Christian Democrats do between them represent a large majority of the population of Europe, a population that knows very well that the drift is towards union. Anti-Europe parties exist and have so far been rejected by the majority. Even in Britain, a clear chance to pull out via a referendum was quite decisively rejected.

The German Christian Democrats are a long way from being my favourite people. But it is they who have repeatedly crushed and disrupt German neo-Fascist parties, limiting such people to the status of an obnoxious fringe.

In Italy, the fall of the worst and most sleazy branch of Christian Democracy initially let in something quite a bit worse, a coalition of bigots, tricksters and Fascists. Under the slogan of ending corruption, the Italians got a government that reestablished friendly relations with the Mafia. The old corrupt crown have been replaced by a new corrupt crowd, a crowd that shows a strong hostility to all that was wise and positive in the ‘Italian Economic Miracle’. This may be containable – the original Italian Fascists were less obnoxious than their counterparts in other nations. But many factors in the present situation reminds one of the 1920s and 1930s.

The new factor that gives hope for avoiding the disasters on 1926-1944 is the presence of a truly effective supranational body in the European Union. It would have to be broken up before any really heavy nationalism or fascism could get going. Yet this is just what Goldsmith is after.

Goldsmith, of course, has his own vision of Europe, superior to the actually existing reality. Just as the Far Left in the 1970s had their own superior vision, that led them to disrupt the real if limited gains that were then possible. Apart from us in the Bevin Society, the entire left called for ‘all or nothing’. And ended up with nothing.

Some of what Goldsmith says about Far Eastern competition makes sense. But then, a lot of people have said something of the sort. The gradual equalisation of Europe and East Asia is no bad thing in itself. Handled well, it could be a great blessing for everyone. Handled badly it could also be a great curse, of course, even a ‘trap’. But all of this is well known. Free market dogmatists want to break down all barriers, which would lead to a massive drop in living standard for European and North American workers, followed probably by some massive right-wing counter-reaction. For this reason it is all being done slowly and carefully, with some regard for the perils and destructiveness of free trade. Arguably, nothing like enough care is being shown, but the problems are at least understood. And as the richer parts of East Asia overtake the poorer parts of Western Europe, the potential for harm becomes gradually less.

Goldsmith’s distinctiveness comes in wanted to cut out Far Eastern competition at the same time as impoverishing ordinary working people in Western Europe. He says “the universal welfare state cannot be sustained. Its economic costs and its social consequences are unbearable” (p 87). That is to say, the methods that led to an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity since World War Two must be thrown out and replaced with bad old measures that have always previously led to misery, starvation and warfare.

“For decades we have defined our system without any thought as to why the need for welfare develops or how we should provide support without destroying the moral fibre of those who receive it and without destabilising society as a whole” (p 99).

This ‘loss of moral fibre’ is not spelt out very specifically. Presumably it does not include living in adulterous relationships, nor keeping two separate families, since that is how Goldsmith himself lives. In point of fact, he says nothing very specific about what’s good or bad in modern social trends. He never defines just what it is that other people have failed to define properly. He’s as much of a muddlehead as his old enemies in Private Eye, who talk like old-fashioned moralists while including all sorts of modern permissiveness in their small adds. (Back in the sixties, I seem to remember that Private Eye was full of things that just did not appear in magazines that ordinary people would encounter or would want to be seen reading.)

Goldsmith calls for a return to some supposed ‘good old days’. One need only look at Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 to discover how the much purer capitalism and minimal welfare of 19th century Britain produced a vastly more drastic break-down of family life. Measures like abolishing child labour and providing more education reversed this trend for a time. So too did the influence of the rest of society on a working class that gained some rights through trade unionism. For a time, one had the strong familiar family patterns of the ‘respectable’ working class. But then you had 1920s American innovations like divorce and the break-up of the extended family – disturbances of a genuinely old tradition, changes in life’s fundamentals whose impact was very accurately foreseen by the reactionaries of that era.

Everyone nowadays pretends that divorce and nuclear families are part of the traditional natural Christian order of things. This is much less rational than what the real traditionalists were saying a couple of generations back. The final breakdown of conventional morality that occurred in the 1960s was a public recognition of conventional Christianity’s loss of credibility among the mass of the population. The Enlightenment and civilised paganism had finally spread right through the society.

Strictly speaking, family life in British society has already collapsed. The self-regulating kin groups have almost all gone. All that remain are personal and sexual bonds, ‘nuclear families’ that are neither traditional nor very stable. People stay in pair-bonded relationships for as long as it suits them – for their whole lives, in many cases. But the balance between freedoms and obligations has changed. Obligations are for other people: In one’s own case it is always the freedom to live one’s own life that is paramount.

Since this arrangement is not obviously worse than the actual practice of the world which proceeded it, no reversion to older forms looks likely. I myself am sure that we gained far more than we lost. But society can not work effectively until we drop the pretence and start imposing only those limitations that we ourselves would be willing to accept.

Conventional families were the product of peasant agriculture. They have always withered under the pressures of both commerce and urban life. The family without a little family-worked patch of land or secure family-run small business turns out to be a very unnatural and unstable thing. It persists mostly out of habit and out of regard for customs from earlier times. And what Goldsmith says on family life is incoherent, the reflex protest of a discontented right-winger, a man who has no intention of curbing any of his own pleasures.

***

On business matters, Goldsmith very much follows the Anglo-American line that profits must override all other considerations. The minor detail that the more protected and more socially concerned management in Germany, Japan and the rest of East Asia have comfortably outperformed ‘proper’ capitalism does not enter his mental universe. Not unless it is this that makes him dread their influence. Certainly, he is a prime example of the right-wing business nihilism that broke up much that once seemed solid and reliable.

“Just as he had condemned the suffocation of England and the bureaucracy of France in the past, now he was attacking the stuffy “corporatism” of the United States. That was the new windmill he chose to tilt at on the road to Wall Street.

“‘Although corporations belong to their shareholders,’ he wrote not long afterwards in the Wall Street Journal, ‘corporate managements sometimes believe that the business that employs them has become an institution and that they are the trustees of that institution. Some believe that they have developed some sort of proprietorial rights. Shareholders then become no more than an inconvenience.’ That was not Jimmy Goldsmith’s view, particularly if and when he intended to become one of an American corporation’s major shareholders. He had every intention of making himself extremely inconvenient to any corporate management that failed to take him seriously when he launched a takeover bid. ‘The principal difference between a friendly merger and a hostile takeover is that management agrees to a merger. A hostile takeover is carried out without their approval. A hostile takeover is only hostile to established management’…

“In the America of the mid-1980s, with the mania for massive takeover takeovers running at the highest level for almost two decades, Jimmy Goldsmith suddenly found himself perfectly placed to do what he had always done best- topple the established order.

“America seemed to prize a piratical predatory individualist stalking established companies. Even the New York Times had concluded its March 1985 editorial by arguing that “Corporate raiders don”t perform their useful function altruistically. But their self-interest usually leads to a collective good.” He had been preparing himself for precisely this opportunity all his life. “In a free economy the inefficient are eliminated and the efficient – as long as they remain so – grow for the benefit of all,” he wrote in The Financier magazine. There were no rules that Jimmy Goldsmith liked better than the rules of the jungle and the free market” (Tycoon, p 314 – 315.)He can take this view while being well aware of the basically irrational nature of market movements. “‘I don’t often invest in the market,’ Jimmy Goldsmith explains, ‘but I sometimes do, and when I do I will never invest if I don’t first telephone half a dozen supposed experts and find them unanimous. Because when 90 per cent of people are thinking the same thing, you can be certain that if you do exactly the opposite you’ll make a fortune; and there’s a very good structural reason for that.

“‘If everybody thinks that the market is going up then one thing is certain – they’ve already invested all their funds because they think they’re going to increase them. So there’s no more money left to go into the market. Therefore the market can only go down. If everybody thinks that the market is going to go down then they will have already sold, so they’re full of cash, and at the slightest turn they’re going to plunge in again and buy. The market can only go up. Structurally if you can find unanimity and do the opposite you can be certain to be successful”. (Ibid, p 303).

Sir James Goldsmith has a wonderfully good understanding of how to increase his own wealth by methods that are entirely legal, even if many people find them objectionable. He plays the existing system, and plays it in a rather more ruthless fashion than people were used to. He has been clever, and also quite lucky, surviving at least one disaster that should have finished him off. Just as similar setbacks must have finished off many other clever ambitious but only averagely lucky ‘entrepreneurs’. Goldsmith’s success as a stocks-and-shares gambler does not make him remotely competent to pass judgment on wider matters.

Business is a peculiar game, much stranger and more complex than chess or poker or any of the other intellectual oddities that humanity has invented over the centuries. But the exact relationship between business strategies and the growth of human prosperity is a complex one. Classical capitalism in 19th century Britain and the USA amazed the world, but only because there was no serious competition. Neither of them ever managed as much as 2% annual growth over any long period. They looked impressive only in a world that expected one century to be much like the last: they were decidedly sluggish by modern standards.

The British economy has shown a remarkable consistency since the 18th century. Its initial dramatic success came from being the only society that played the capitalist and industrial game. When other nations had to think it all out from scratch, they came up with superior variants on the original. Each wave has improved over the last – America better than Britain, Western Europe better than America, East Asia currently the best of all. All going for more state control, better treatment for labour and active partnership between the state and private enterprise.

Tory ‘reforms’ in the 1980s were a social abomination. They boosted the rich and created a huge mass of displaced unwanted poor. The justification for this was that it would be good for the economy, and therefore good for everyone in the long run. But at the end of the day, the Tory record for economic growth is the worst for any post-war government. Meanwhile our more socially concerned European neighbours continue to outperform us. France did this in the 1950s, using exactly the dirigiste methods that are anathema both to Thatcher and to Goldsmith. A man would not be considered to be wise on general social matters if he were a very fine chess-player or an outstanding concert pianist or a mathematical genius. Unlike any of these, businessmen like Goldsmith – and also some of the rising strata of business women – consider that what they have learned in their peculiar, stressful and artificial world of competitive capitalism is suitable for universal application. It ain’t necessarily so. Eliminating business-people entirely seems to be bad in the long run, as the USSR found. But it is also a good idea to keep them in proper bounds and not allowing them to rampage all over the society. Not only is the unrestrained spread of business values a social disaster, it is also likely to be bad economically.

Business in a society probably plays the same role as oil in an old-fashioned clockwork watch. Some oil is necessary for the mechanism to run at all. Extra oil may improve it. But oil alone will never tell the time.

Goldsmith, Ricardo, Adam Smith etc. rely on a simple identification of extra revenues gained by a successful capitalist with extra wealth gained by the whole society. Now why should this be so? Europe was ready for some sort of economic take-off in the 18th century. Governments had done all that they could to promote it; the ruling class actively desired it. There had been a steady expansion of commerce in Europe from the 11th century onwards, boosted by the state-led opening up of the Americas from the 15th century onwards. There was in England the state sponsorship of science through the Royal Society, and the use of Patents to encourage openness about new inventions. There was an active well-educated and anti-traditional stratum of Nonconformists, ‘strangers in their own land’, ready and eager to revolutionise the world. Full-blown capitalism – the world view that sees life as a burden on money – only developed later.

18th century Britain was highly commercial, in the sense that money had invaded many spheres of life. But almost everyone saw money as a means to an end – that end usually being a life as a member of the aristocracy. Strict capitalism – the notion of money as an end in itself – spread and flourished only after industry had got started. One might just as reasonably see modern capitalism as a result of industrialism, a system of grand gambling that only a rich strong society can get away with.

The British ruling class in the early 19th century gradually came to accept Adam Smith’s dogmatic notion that success had been achieved only through the profit motive. It was taken as an undeniable fact that industrialisation had happened despite the various government attempts to boost prosperity. Such ‘wasteful’ activities were therefore discouraged, or at best left unchanged. Conceited Victorians were sure that it was God and Free Trade that had made Britain mighty. They sat back confidently for God and Free Trade to make them mightier yet.

It was the beginning of the end. Britain was overtaken by rival nations like Germany, where the state played a large role. In the rest of Europe, business always accepted wider social responsibilities. And both law and custom prevented the sort of predatory take-over and restructuring that has been the basis of Goldsmith’s success.

Victorian Britain was sure that it had God on its side. God perhaps took a different view of the matter.

Even though Goldsmith’s opposition to GATT and unrestricted free trade make might make him seem a bit leftist, it is an irrational opinion held by a right-wing bigot. An enthusiast for allowing the rich within Europe to grab to grab the public wealth and ignore customary social obligations. From any sort of serious left-wing viewpoint, the man is far more of an enemy than any Liberal or Christian Democrat. He should be treated as such.