Today, Explained - "A horrible miscarriage of justice"

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

A Florida millionaire created a system to rape or abuse at least 80 young girls for years. The current Secretary of Labor may have helped him get away with it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just a warning, today's show is about a series of sex crimes against young women and girls. The details are appalling. We'll start in a few seconds. Julie Brown, we've known for years that a Florida multimillionaire named Jeffrey Epstein did appalling things to young women. Some of them have already spoken up about it, But in your reporting for the Miami Herald, you recently found evidence that added to these numbers. Now we know at least 80 women were sexually abused and raped or rented out to other wealthy, powerful people. What exactly happened here? Epstein was a multimillionaire hedge fund manager who began his career on Wall Street with Bear Stearns. He was able to ingratiate himself with

some very important and wealthy people who he persuaded to invest in his company. And these people wanted to be around him because he also had a lot of money and he was willing to donate to their foundations. Who are we talking about with these famous, powerful people? You know, we know that former President Bill Clinton had flown on one of his private jets quite a number of times. We know that Donald Trump had been on his plane and had been at some of his parties. There were plenty of celebrities that were around him, David Copperfield, Naomi Campbell, Kevin Spacey, just a lot of really high profile people that he surrounded himself with. And while he was rubbing elbows with these powerful people and throwing parties for them

and making donations to their various causes and fundraisers and charities, what was he doing behind the scenes? He had an obsession with very young girls. We now know that in the early 2000s, he would lure these teenage girls in Palm Beach into his home. The girls would be offered $200 to $300 to give an old man a massage. And these girls who had no money, who came from broken homes, who had parents who were either in jail or were on drugs,

they were thinking, all I have to do is give a man a massage and I'm going to get $200. But what actually happened was he would molest them. And if the girls were uncomfortable, then he asked those same girls, look, okay, you don't have to do this, but bring me more girls. So he had this revolving door of teenage girls coming in and out of the house for trysts, you know, two, three, four times a day. Do any of these girls' stories stick out to you? I know you've spoken to some of them. I spoke with Courtney Wilde, and her story is pretty poignant because she was really almost homeless. My mother was on drugs at the time, and she couldn't provide for me.

You know, as with most of the girls here, she was brought there by a couple of friends. And she sort of got lured into this practice where he said, I can help you. And he offered her money to bring him girls. By the time I was 16, I brought him up to 75 girls, all the ages of, you know, 14, 15, 16, people going from 8th grade to 9th grade at just school parties is where I'd recruit him from. So she became one of his primary recruiters, and he wanted fresh faces every day.

Every day? Yeah, every day he was in Palm Beach. There was another girl, Virginia Roberts, who was one of the early girls that he lured into his operation. I went from an abusive situation to being a runaway to living in foster homes to just already being hardened by life on the streets. She had had a tough life. She had been trafficked to pedophiles on the streets of Miami. She thought, okay, well, you know, how do I become a massage therapist? So they brought her to Epstein's mansion and basically just started to groom her into, you know, here's the massage, here's what you do, but you take off your clothes. And, you know, it went from there.

It ended with sexual abuse and intercourse. And then a pat on the back. You've done a really good job. Like, you know, thank you very much and here's $200. It was exactly the same story every time. My friend brought me here. We went into the kitchen. There was a chef there. He would offer us food. Sometimes we would eat some cereal or a sandwich and then I would be let up this circular staircase. And it was like kind of like a spiral almost. And she brings us up the stairs and it was like, kind of like a spiral almost.

And she brings us up the stairs, and it was like spiral stairs. There were pictures on the wall of naked girls. We were led into this vast master bath bedroom combination. And there was a mint green and pink sofa in there. He took sex toys out of the drawer of this bureau. All the girls had the same details of what he did. He came in in a towel. He dropped his towel. He made them, you know, straddle him at first on his back. So we would take the massage table out and set it up in the middle of the room. And then he came in with his white towel on around him. And then he just laid down in his towel on his stomach and he was just talking to people on the phone. When he flipped over, that's when he said, okay, you can go ahead and take off your shirt and pants,

but you can stay in your underwear. It was all the same story. So how did the police find out all of this was going on? In 2005, one 14-year-old girl confessed to her parents that she had been there and what had happened. And her parents went to Palm Beach Police and Palm Beach Police launched an investigation. And as soon as they found out that this 14-year-old girl was brought there by two other girls, they went to those two other girls. Those two other girls told them, well, these two other girls took me there. And it just kept going on and on. And the police chief didn't know when it would ever end because it was just one after another that they were finding that were involved in this. So what happens once the police get involved? Well, the police did a pretty thorough investigation. First, they had to interview

the girls, which wasn't easy because in the beginning, the girls really didn't want to tell them what they did. They were afraid and shamed. And after that, they found in the trash all these notepads with copies of messages that said, for example, Courtney can't come at four, or Sally has soccer practice at three, she can't make it here till five. So they eventually went to the Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer and said, you know, here's what we got this guy doing this. And initially, Barry Krischer said, well, this is terrible. We're going to put that guy away. You know, we're going to go after him, go full steam ahead. And then as soon as Epstein found out, he hired Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. Alan Dershowitz comes to Krischer

with a whole dossier full of information on this 14-year-old girl saying, this girl comes from a horrible family. She, you know, look, she's on here on MySpace drinking a beer. He was trying to discredit her. And so Krischer went from, you know, wow, we're going to go after this guy to telling the police, well, I don't know if we want to even prosecute him. And as this is all happening, police are just getting more and more girls. I mean, it was just snowballing. So they're dealing with the fact that they have, you know, all these girls that they're interviewing, and this is a small police force, and a state attorney who is sort of backing off. So then the Palm Beach police chief asked Krischer to remove himself from the case because Krischer kept giving them pushback.

And then the chief took it to the FBI and said, this has to be prosecuted. This is a sex trafficking situation, and the Palm Beach state attorney doesn't want to prosecute it. And that's what happened. After the break, Jeffrey Epstein gets a sentence you won't believe. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. When a brutal murder rocks a small town in Georgia, everyone is shocked. Did the new guy in town do it?

Turns out, yes, the cops say, and they quickly throw him in prison. But then another murder happens, and another. In the end, four bodies, two convictions, and one man in jail for a crime he didn't commit. Murderville, Georgia is a new investigative podcast from The Intercept. It's from two reporters who've got more than 30 years investigating wrongful convictions. In the six-episode series, they uncover what happens when rural law enforcement and state investigators lock up their first suspect while another one's free to kill. Murderville shines an investigative light deep into rural Georgia where racial lines are as obvious

as train tracks, cops are never questioned, and being an outsider can get you locked up with no chance for justice, even when the evidence could prove your innocence. Check out Murderville wherever you find your podcasts. So Julie, all of these women get wrapped up in this investigation.

It goes from the Palm Beach Police Department to the FBI. Is Jeffrey Epstein convicted? No, he's not even prosecuted. What happened is the FBI picked up where the Palm Beach police left off, and they re-interviewed a lot of these girls. They also obtained a lot more evidence in the way of witnesses. Epstein had butlers, housekeepers who knew what he was doing and who gave them other evidence to corroborate these girls' stories, which, by the way, all these girls' stories were the same, and they didn't all know each other.

25, 30, you know, and eventually there were more girls all telling the same story. Considering that all of these girls are telling the same story and that this case gets escalated to the FBI, how is it that he isn't prosecuted? He hired more attorneys. He hired Jay Lefkowitz, who had political connections in Washington. He was at the time the special U.S. envoy to North Korea. He hired Kenneth Starr. He had so much money that he was able to hire lawyer after lawyer after lawyer. What does this all-star team of lawyers get Jeffrey Epstein? He got 13 months in a county jail. But, you know, within a couple of months,

he was moved to a private wing of the jail. Florida has really tough sex offender laws, and most sex offenders in Florida don't go to the county jail. They go to prison. And in Epstein's case, he not only went to the county jail and had a private wing, but he was allowed this work release that the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office's policies say sex offenders aren't even eligible for work release, but somehow he got work release. And he had his own private driver pick him up almost every day early in the morning and drive him to this office that he had set up, you know, purposefully for this work release. And he was in this office from literally, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning until 10 o'clock at night. Who signed off on this deal?

Well, Acosta signed off on the plea bargain. Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time. He was considered a rising star in the party. He had served two White House posts in the past, very ambitious. And at the time, he was sort of in the forefront of a Justice Department effort to go after people who had child pornography on their computers. So it was ironic when you have someone like Jeffrey Epstein, who, you know, had molested dozens and maybe even hundreds of girls, that Acosta would start Trump's secretary of labor, and he has oversight for an agency essentially that oversees child labor laws, human trafficking cases that involve women very much like the women that he bypassed in Epstein's case. Was this deal public? Was there any oversight? All of this was negotiated and done in secret. And we know that because in the court records, there are now emails and letters between Acosta and his team and members of Epstein's legal team,

in which they specifically talked about keeping this secret from the victims and from the media. I mean, they knew if the media really knew what was going to happen, it would have been a field day. And so part of their strategy was to keep this quiet. Now that he's Secretary of Labor and your reporting and the reporting of the Miami Herald has brought a lot of attention back to this story and what seems like a conspiracy, this sex ring, has he had to answer for this cushy she had been essentially Jeffrey Epstein's sex slave for many years and that she had been directed to have sex with a lot of powerful people. You know, before you know it, I'm being lent out to politicians and to academics and royalty. Acosta was forced to make a statement. And he essentially said that the reason why this was made was he didn't feel that the case was enough, that these lawyers had prevailed upon the U.S. attorney's office.

You know, he used the word assault, that they had, you know, launched an assault against his U.S. attorneys. And that he had some concerns that if he didn't arrange this deal, that Epstein wouldn't get any jail time at all. So he said essentially, look, it was good we got him this because the power of his attorneys and his financial means, he could have gotten off. Will anyone be held accountable for this in a real way? Well, when the story broke in late November, Alex Acosta had been on a list of possible successors to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. After the story broke, we found out that he was pulled off the list. And we pretty quickly began getting calls from some lawmakers wanting to write a letter to the Justice Department's inspector general demanding a further investigation. District of Florida. The current Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, gave a non-prosecution deal

to a wealthy and well-connected serial sex offender. Rather than pursue the indictment fully to ensure the individual could never prey again on minor girls, Secretary Acosta entered into an extremely preferential deal that resulted in the perpetrator of horrific crimes against children serving just 13 months in the county jail. I think as of now, there's probably 32 lawmakers who have agreed, including two Republicans, mostly Democrats, but two Republicans who believe that this was a horrible miscarriage of justice. And they want to look into how that happened and whether there was any misconduct in arranging this deal. And all the women that you spoke to who were the victims of this miscarriage of justice and this man's pedophilia, where are they now? How are they now? Well, I was able to find out a lot about the women, even those that weren't willing to talk to me. It appears that a lot of them, you know, have gone on with their lives, married, had children, they're realtors.

One I noticed is a teacher. One is a Hollywood actress, a pretty well-known Hollywood actress. But the four that I spoke to on the record are still struggling a lot with what they did. You know, they all blame themselves, which is heartbreaking to see. To me, still to this day, it is my biggest shame that I carry around that I will never get rid of. And I'm really, really sad that I brought other girls my age and even younger into a world that they should have never been introduced to. You know, they're older now and they're thinking, how could I have done something like that? It was

so stupid. But, you know, I spoke with an FBI agent who worked full time on these kinds of sex trafficking cases. And he said, we think of these as girls and we think they will know better. But when you are that young, your brain isn't fully developed and your emotions aren't fully developed. So you don't really understand the ramifications of things that you do when you're young. And that's why you need people who are older, like prosecutors, like police, like the criminal justice system, to, in some sense, protect younger people from doing things like this. And it doesn't appear that, you know, the federal prosecutors did that because by charging him with prostitution, they had labeled these girls as prostitutes, not as victims. So it was as if they weren't victims at all.

And this has had a big effect on them because they've come we think of our criminal justice system baked into this story. I mean, I guess we all have a sense that the rich can get away with murder, but we also live in a country where sex crimes are punished harshly. And yet this guy abused dozens and dozens of girls. And then this network of powerful men stepped in to make sure that he didn't have to pay for that. I mean, what do you take away from that? I think that there's a lot of, quite frankly, we know from the news and we know from all the cases that have been publicized over the past year. Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar. And if you really think about it, these are people that felt that they were somehow entitled to do this, you know, for a very long period of time. So I think that to some degree, some of these prosecutors and

people in law enforcement really didn't think what they were doing was a crime, that the girls and women who complained about this, their stories were always discounted. You know, I started this story before the launch of the Me Too movement. And, you know, fortunately for me, I think it helped in some respects, because I think some of the girls were a little bit less fearful of coming forward. But it seems to me that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to sexual abuse of women. Do you think your reporting and the way that it's publicized this story and made people aware of this network of extremely powerful men who came to Jeffrey Epstein's

defense, do you think it will encourage some of the victims who perhaps haven't spoken up against what he did to them to come forward? It's hard to say because, remember, this happened a very long time ago, and these women went on with their lives, many of them never told anybody. Their parents don't know, Their husbands don't know. So, you know, why would they come forward, really? They're going to lose more than they probably feel they would gain. But because I think people are paying attention, because lawmakers are calling for an investigation, I think and I hope that they find some solace in the fact that people are now realizing what a horrible miscarriage of justice this was.

Julie Brown is an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald. She interviewed all the women you heard in this episode for her reporting and graciously allowed us to include the audio in this episode. You can find all of her work over at the Miami Herald site. This is Today Explained. Thank you.