Palm Beach, Florida
November 2004
Jane Doe No. 2
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.
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 2 in order to protect her identity as a minor.
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There would be many more 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 has recently been mentioned as a possible successor to former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure in early November.
The Miami Herald analyzed thousands of pages of court records and lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents, and also tracked down more than 80 women who say they were victimized, 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 whom Dershowitz described as “an accomplished drama student’’ who hurled profanities at his investigator at “a furious pace.’’
“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, they 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 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.’’
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Epstein also hired Bruce Reinhart, then an assistant U.S. attorney in Palm Beach. Reinhart, now a U.S. magistrate, 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.
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 — 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 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, 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.
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: “You … assured me that your office would not … contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants and their respective counsel in this matter.’’
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.
You don’t have to be a detective to connect these dots. The Orange Crusader paid off acosta for letting him fuck children. But never worry the rabble will still cheer for the OC at his next asshole packed rally-especially the devout rabble. They’re especially prone to the P T Barnums of life.
BTW, I wonder what killed Recarey. My guess it was a 2 shots in the head suicide.
Vote, my ass.
That pretty much sums it up.
Bud Light drinking Trumptards scare of me more than any threat from the left or the clowns in government.
I completely agree. When I first started at TBP I thought it was full of the hippest thinkers ever. Back then I relished the thumbs up my posts got. Then when this Bullshit Artist got elected and I called him out I started to enjoy the thumbs down from the rabble. A bit disappointed not one here but hope springs eternal. I hated Ann Coulter when she was peddling her ass for W’s war on Iraq but she’s come around. Check out her latest:
I’m sure that there’s a name for the thing you’re doing but I don’t know what it’s called, so let’s use the term CCRider Syndrome. That’s where you learn about something and then come to accept it as a truth and then you see other people who haven’t discovered what you’ve recently learned you accuse them of being rabble.
I leaned toward Trump for reasons I was clear to articulate (he pissed off all the malevolent players) and wary of the things I knew very few people considered worth mentioning (serial family abandonment). It took me almost two years to give up on him. He showed his true colors by not keeping his promises in regards to our National borders, and by not applying the laws to people based on their status. By giving someone a chance to prove themselves, for good or evil didn’t make me stupid, it was simply that I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision. Now we have more than enough to judge him on his merits or lack thereof.
So now he’s shown himself for what he is, just another Narco-like oligarch in a power struggle. And that is probably what the entire power structure of the Western world really is, not some byzantine global conspiracy, but a series of jet-set criminal gangs jockeying for power.
So rather than ‘I told you so’ to every one, help piece it together for them, write a long form piece that lays out your argument for other people to consider. That’s the kind of audience you have here; you’ve seen too many people alter their worldviews based on the preponderance of well reasoned arguments over the course of time to dismiss them.
Fair enough. I don’t know how to submit an article so if you can enlighten me that’s great. Here’s the short version.
What I learned is that democracy is a farce. It’s a ruling elite that operates by force-the very antithesis of a moral society. Read any of the Founding Father’s on the subject. Every vote cast promotes slavery. I also learned about the precious fucking vote when Kennedy had his head blown off and the cover story shouldn’t have fooled a retard. It’s for those-and many other reasons I voted exactly twice in the last 35 years-for Ron Paul in the repo primaries. I knew it was a destructive act because if he had any chance of winning they’d have grassy knolled him. But I felt I owed it to him and he was the only person in my lifetime who had the sort of character I would choose to be ‘led’ by. Compare his character to the Orange Crusader-especially on this subject. Dr Paul healed children and the OC fucked them. And you brag that it took you 2 years to figure him out? He was born a scumbag and he’ll die one.
I do indeed call trumpsters rabble because that’s exactly what I think they are. They’re loud, ignorant saps who can be relied upon by their owners to behave in a predictable pattern that is easy to control. Just another reason to despise democracy-Who wants to be bound to a pack of lemmings?
CCRider Syndrome? Put it on my headstone.
I have liked/disliked Ann Coulter off and on, back and forth.
If you would like an editor, I know a good one.
Ooooooh give me more of the VOTING EQUALS SLAVERY STUFF!
HSF, would you explain this term?
Narco-like oligarch in a power struggle
The USA doesn’t have a Democracy, a Greek gift; it never will. We have a Republic, Roman snake oil.
If we had a Democracy, you’d get a vote on legislation before Congress.
Republics give your vote to a representative, and that person is usually sold to the highest bidder.
Trump is odious, always has been, and he probably won’t change. But he’s probably the best negotiator since Kissinger, because nobody can read his cards until he tweets them.
His clownish assault on the swamp was doomed before he was sworn in, but he gave more hope for real change than O’sphincter did.
Cornered but not cowed by the CIA (which controls the press, academia, and finance) while a world-wide kabuki of outrage echoes endlessly because the Russians stole Christmas from Hitlery, Trump still follows his own star as much as possible, and I appreciate that.
The Orangeatan had nowhere to turn but the Military (full of deplorables) – which is absolutely controlled by the financial oligarchs (who hire Pentagon Stars), for support. And some support they’ve been, eh? Backed him right off his well-intended overtures toward China and Russian
No, the long game cannot be played Trump-style.
Presidents must promise, in their 1st Inaugural address, that their administration will work tirelessly to remove nuclear weapons from this world. Then, before the dust collects on their Nobel Peace Prize, serve up a trillion dollar taxpayer-tab for new, tactical nukes.
It puts a basketball court in the Presidential Library.
And you vote matters not one whit.
Funny, I was just wondering if she grew up for real this time.
Ann isn’t everyones cup of tea but I wouldn’t kick her out of bed on a rainy Saturday night.
I suspect she’s a transvestite. There’s not much that’s fem about him/her.
What a painful and unpleasant read this was. Despite a visceral reaction to it is there anything we can take away from this piece?
1) Have these children no parents? Were they all orphans rounded up from the street against their will, taken away to be used because there was no one in their life who felt a sense of responsibility for them, who loved and cherished them? The way it reads it was about 50/50 single parent- excuse me, fatherless- households. This is perhaps the single worst decision associated with child rearing and it is almost exclusively one made by females.
2) What is the response of one of these young girls immediately after being used in such a way by this man? To go out and actively recruit her friends to be similarly used. Strike two for female decision making skills.
We could analyze this human crime wave for the next ten years and never get closer to the conclusion we can easily make today; nothing is more dangerous to a minor child living in the Western world than an absence of parental involvement, nothing. In every single one of the cases mentioned above there are at least one or more factors that involve an almost criminal level of neglect on the part of the custodial parent(s) or caretaker. Single mothers CANNOT raise children to any standard of normalcy, period. It. Cannot. Be Done. To raise a child effectively, safely, so that they are both protected and loved adequately to arrive at adulthood with their bodies and minds somewhat intact requires vigilance, concern, close observation, not only of there physical location at any given moment, but their mental and emotional state on a day to day basis, by both parents.
Here’s another thing, having raised both male and female children; females are far more vulnerable to the influences of their “friends”- and I use that term loosely- and need extra close observation of their comings and goings day and night and close scrutiny of the behaviors and habits of the peers that they associate with. If your child brings home a friend who exhibits signs that do not fit the norms of your family, then they may not associate with them socially. Parents have the right to make those kinds of decisions but too frequently abjure. Females going through puberty and into adolescence require an almost constant supervision as they adjust to both the effects of their changing hormones and wildly changing emotions. These things are every bit as dangerous as loaded guns and if you aren’t 100% on top of that reality you shouldn’t be a parent. You don’t hand a bottle of booze and a set of car keys to a 17 year-old male child, why would you hand complete autonomy to a 14 year old female? Both lack the experience and the wisdom to make the right choices most of the time, it is the responsibility of the parent to help them learn how to use these developing traits and freedoms in the same way that they taught them how to walk, or bathe or exercise caution around stairs and streets. In each one of these cases the root of the advantage taken by the predators involved lies squarely at the feet of the negligent parents.
I couldn’t help but notice another obvious reality and that is the phenomenon of female willingness to trade sexual access for financial reward. This I believe is a hardwired genetic predisposition and throughout the entirety of the article it was never once suggested nor implied. Women have always used their sexual access as a means of acquiring material gain. In a perfect world, particularly if you happen to be the parent of a female child, the choice they make that involves this innate drive will provide them with a husband and a father for their children. That is a panacea and it has far more value than all the $300 “massages” they could ever give to some horny old perverts regardless of how wealthy they may be. It is clear throughout the two articles that one of the primary drivers of the girls involved in this behavior is cash payments and it served as a motivator for them to corrupt their “friends”, again and again. While I do not hold them completely accountable due to their age and lack of maturity, it is an indicator of some primal drive in virtually all of them to leverage a male’s resources in exchange for their sexual access. How could this be so easily glossed over? And how could the sudden appearance of either money or possessions that these girls came into be missed by their parents or caretakers unless they were purposefully oblivious? A 14 year-old with several hundred dollars is not going to make any wiser decisions than they originally made in accepting the money and the new phone/clothes/jewelry would be a clear indicator- especially in these low-income households.
And this brings me to the last point. If I were to discover to my shame and horror that an adult male took this kind of advantage of my teenage daughter, there would be no police report. No one would be making deals on our behalf with a prosecutor, or arranging counselling or intervention. The system we live in is so thoroughly corrupted by money and power there is no justice to be had and anyone who doesn’t know this is simply too stupid or too ignorant to be raising children. The only form of correction that would have any kind of impact at all would be to make things right in a biblical sense. And with a system as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent as out ours is, ensuring such retribution would be possible without a means of discovery is almost a certainty, especially if that verdict was rendered after a cooling down period.
Revenge, as the Sicilians say, is a dish best served cold.
Single parent homes are sub-optimal at best. Females cannot be left to their own devices without risk of depredation. Successful parenting means the restriction of the freedoms of immature minors until such time as they are able to make moral decisions for themselves. Parenting is a full time occupation that requires constant vigilance and close interest in even the most minor details of a child’s life until they are able to stand on their own two feet. Virtually everything our society promotes in terms of sexual liberation is detrimental to the well-being of not only the individual, but society itself. That an article like this, from a mainstream publication that is a mouthpiece for the decadence and corruption of our society even dares to tut-tut such behavior, is beyond farce. The media is as much an accomplice to these crimes as the women who acted as procurers for this Bluebeard.
Agreed. If this sort of thing happened in say 1915 Georgia, he’d be dangling from a tree.
Scrabble you make some excellent points. My father passed away when I was five. I was 13 when my eldest brother enlisted in the military and my mother let her alcoholic boyfriend move in. He was a disabled vet with an officer’s pension. He didn’t work. He couldn’t work. He was too much of a mess. His life was 100% all about Bacardi 151. A half a gallon every single day. He was a selfish man, he was not supportive, not a father or a father figure. He could be the nicest guy in the world, but could also be abusive. I endured his presence in the house until I was fifteen when I quit school, went to work full time and moved out. Years later my mother told me that it broke her heart and she regretted the way things turned out, but she still seemed to resent that I’d forced her to choose between either him or me.
The closest thing I had to a father figure growing up was my oldest brother who did the best he could, but really wasn’t equipped for the task having essentially raised himself. Mom did her best, but she worked long hours at a minimum wage job and when she was home she was tired and didn’t really have the time or energy to engage much with us kids.
There was a hell of a lot of stuff that I had to learn the hard way. I tend to believe that my life would have been immensely better and easier had my dad been there to help raise me, and guide me through some of my poor choices, but I also see a lot of guys who grew up with two parents and can’t function without a wife to tell them what to think, how to behave, who to associate with and generally be their mommy. They still haven’t learned how to take care of themselves or think for themselves. There is something to be said for being a feral child. Your chances for survival are diminished, but if you do survive you develop assets that can only be learned by hard knocks. I have another brother who stayed at home. He never grew up. He spent some time out on his own, but not much. He lived in Mom’s basement until she passed away. He is unable to function in society, earn a living or take care of himself.
I envy people who grew up in a stable family environment. It is such a huge advantage and a head start on a quality adult life.
I don’t know if you saw this one, Farmer, but it runs along the same lines where women get a pass on being responsible for their actions.
This salaried tutor got caught humping the rising football star and then tried to claim he was manipulating her and forcing her to do horrible things.
One of the texts recovered from her phone (she deleted THOUSANDS)?
“I need you in my bed now.”
His reply made me laugh.
“Are you picking me up?”
So this 30 year old hot teacher was being abused by a 15 year old meanie without a drivers license. Perhaps he rode over on his bicycle to abuse her. But, wait… didn’t she need him in her bed?
It is all too confusing when the adults act like kids and the kids do too.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/catholic-school-tutor-accused-sex-student-15-pictures-woman-garter-belt-article-1.1423175
That explains a lot.
My response to Rossa’ s comment on the first Part of this article and the subsequent link says even more…
https://dailycaller.com/2016/10/09/the-friendship-between-trump-and-a-billionaire-pedophile-that-nobody-wants-to-talk-about/
A couple of snipits from the article…
…
Trump’s friendship with Epstein has been largely untouched in the mainstream press, and those around Trump have been reluctant to provide details on the nature of the two billionaires’ relationship.
…
That Trump’s friendship with Epstein has been given what largely amounts to a pass from the media may be due in part to Epstein’s more prominent ties to Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Epstein’s ties to Clinton and Prince Andrew have largely overshadowed his ties to Trump.
Clinton allies have yet to makes Trump’s Epstein ties a campaign issue.
Then again, any attacks on Trump over his ties to Epstein would almost certainly guarantee that Trump would bring up Clinton’s own documented Epstein ties, including flight logs showing that Clinton took at least 26 trips on Epstein’s infamous private sex plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express.”
To the extent that Trump’s representatives have been asked about his ties to Epstein, they’ve tried to downplay the two billionaires’ relationship.
Last January, Trump attorney Alan Garten told Vice News that his client had “no relationship” with Epstein.
In a statement to The Daily Caller on Sunday, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said that “Mr. Trump only knows [Epstein] socially through the Mar-a-Lago Club, one of the finest private clubs in the world.”
But Trump talked up his friendship with Epstein before the latter’s arrest and public fall from grace.
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine for a 2002 profile of Epstein. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Similarly, a 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein named Trump as one of the “businessmen who dine with him at his home,” and several other articles have pegged Trump and Epstein as friends.
And when FBI investigators looked through Epstein’s private address book, they found 14 different phone numbers for Trump, including numbers for his security guard and houseman. Epstein also had numbers for Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his ex-wife Ivana.
When put under oath, Epstein admitted that he had “socialized” with Trump. But Epstein chose to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights when asked: “Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?” Epstein similarly pleaded the fifth when asked about his relationship to Bill Clinton.
Call that barb wired bat TBP. This case is the soft underbelly of the beast. I don’t expect much commentary from T4C on this one but there is a reason she got so involved in the Q quest and I suspect it has to do with the ‘paedophiles’ as Haerringtone Rieaiechaersone so elegantly puts it.
430,00o sealed indictments. Arrests soon to follow – Q
It’s part of the super secret 44 D chest plan.
Being a father of a daughter , her safety and welfare is still my top priority every hour of every day . I cannot believe this many young girls could fall in to this web of devient sex play and not one father surprised Epstein and others involved with a baseball bat and a sharp knife ending his sexual abilities among other things for life .
Yes I know they are all loaded and appear untouchable but everyone has a momentary lapse of reason , a moment of inattentiveness and that’s when you strike . Obviously courts and judges cannot be trusted in this case and others like it .
Again where are the parents ???
Faux outrage from top to bottom. Not ONE person involved in this tawdry, abusive mess gave a shit about the poor abused girls more than their position, pension, what have you. Not ONE. And not one gives a shit about it now. And they will NEVER give a shit unless justice is meted out, and not the sort a court and prosecutors and lawyers pretend to provide.
Justice would be dragging Epstein out for public floggings. Daily? Weekly? I am opposed to the death penalty, so that is off the table for me. Same treatment for the house staff, attorney enablers and cops who turned a blind eye, and the judge who stamped it all. A long line of people, flogged and flogged again. In public. Televised, in my world, and in prime time.
Take all their assets. Homes, pensions, cars, jewels, off-shore accounts, everything. Fuck their families, let them go on to suffer and learn from their mistakes of putting up with people who abuse young women. I don’t care if they all go live under bridges.
But no. That will never happen. Because nobody gives a shit. God help us, though we do not deserve it.
Send Epstein to Pelican Bay for an overnighter with the infamous “Booty Bandit.”