Relentless Pursuit

by Bradley J. Edwards

  Jean-Luc Brunel’s deposition was up next. He would have no choice but to bury his buddy Epstein—I had too much on him for him to lie his way out of things. The day before the deposition I got a message on my voice mail from his attorney—who was paid for by Jeffrey Epstein—saying that Jean-Luc had to fly to France for an emergency. Of course he did. And he had no plans of ever returning to the United States.

  I filed another motion for sanctions, telling the judge about the lie that had just been created by Brunel and all the reasons that we knew it was a lie. On the one hand, I kept being railroaded and prevented from taking these critical depositions. On the other hand, this was evidence that Epstein was vulnerable. He couldn’t fend off my attack forever.

  There was an occasion in early 2010 when Jeffrey Epstein and I were at an office for another deposition and he called me into a private room. He sat and pointed at the chair across from him. I sat. He leaned back and crossed his foot over his leg. “How long is this going to go on, Brad?” he asked.

  “Till it’s over, I guess,” I shot back.

  He didn’t flinch. He said, “I think you know now, Brad, that you and I are a lot more alike than you originally thought. I’m not talking about our behaviors, but our approach, you know?” Before I could put much thought into that, he immediately followed it up with: “There is a difference, though, and I haven’t put that difference in motion. The difference is that I have unfair power at my fingertips. I hired a former MMA champion who is out there in the hallway, and I have access to all of the resources in the world. You don’t even know who all of my friends are. I haven’t employed my resources only because it wouldn’t be a fair fight. I, like you, am all about being fair, so I am trying to be fair with you. I suggest you start doing the same with me and let’s figure out a way for everyone to walk away.”

  This was an art that Jeffrey Epstein had mastered. He was the best ever at making you believe that he was being the most fair, the most honest, the most revealing, the most exposed, as if he literally had nothing to hide. But he revealed things about himself he wasn’t aware of. Just before he was going to say something totally untrue that he wanted you to believe, he would preface it with an explanation of why you should believe the next thing to come out of his mouth.

  It was obvious, for instance, to anyone looking at the facts that he targeted underage girls for sex, yet he wanted desperately for me to believe that he was really the victim of their opportunistic behavior. In an effort to gain my confidence and resolve cases more favorably for him, he would say things like, “Listen, Brad, I am going to play my cards face-up for you,” while motioning with his hands, turning them palm-up in the air.

  He did this before making a small concession: “I have never denied that these girls came to my house, but I was lied to about some of their ages, I was taken advantage of. I am certainly not asking for anyone to feel sorry for me, only to be treated fairly, the way I treat everyone. You can ask the girls, I was always fair, the same way I am being fair to you. I am going to continue not to use the resources at my disposal because that would not be fair. But I expect you to start being fair to me.”

  Simply saying he wasn’t going to use his power was, of course, a veiled threat that he would use it. Despite that and everything else I knew about him, there was a part of me that was influenced by the words. Not necessarily because I believed him, which I didn’t, but because fairness has always been a soft spot for me, a principle worth taking risks to achieve. He was a master manipulator, and he proved that to me time and time again. Jeffrey played dumb to curry favor, and right at his calculated moment, he pursed his lips and gave sharp retorts with the appearance that they were off the top of his head.

  His real genius was his ability to read his adversary. He was able to exploit his opponent’s values because of the careful attention he paid to both the strengths and weaknesses of the person sitting on the other side of the table. With me, he recognized that I was a competitor but that fairness was a pillar of my personality. Because he was able to identify that, he wanted very much to demonstrate at every stage that he, too, held fairness as a cardinal principle. This would be the quality he constantly tried to exploit. Jeffrey Epstein was a sociopath, and the advantage he gained from the fact that he operated without a conscience was tremendous.

  Epstein had an uncanny ability to keep his lies straight and so give the impression he was never lying. He was always in charge, and when he needed to make that clear, he would. Any time he offended me with one of his tactics, he would quickly blame it on someone else, such as a lawyer. But I knew there was no detail that he did not direct. He was responsible for moving every single chess piece on his side of the board. When he thought he was caught red-handed lying or acting in a way that would cause him to lose credibility, especially in taking an offensive move, he would immediately and believably give the impression that there were so many layers between himself and the person performing the act that he wasn’t even in the same state as the house with the chessboard. Whether it was in court statements about me or my clients or aggressive investigative moves, he acted as though he had no idea who was sitting at the chair moving the pieces.

  The rich and powerful are responsible for and preoccupied with so many important things that they delegate many tasks, therefore they might indeed be unaware of something done on their behalf. That concept made his claims of innocence somewhat believable. But I knew nothing was done on Jeffrey’s behalf without his knowledge.

  There was something about him—an inexplicable charisma—in every encounter I had with him that made me want to like him until I remembered all the reasons I knew I had to dislike him. Jeffrey Epstein was an enigma. An enigma that I would have many more occasions to study. But if I let my guard down and let him go on the offensive, he would destroy my clients, the cases, and me. I needed to constantly make him play defense. In order to keep him playing defense, I had to keep trying to infiltrate his inner sanctum to remove his control. This was his weakness.

  Two weeks later, my law partner Steve Jaffe and I had another meeting with Epstein and his lawyer. He and his lawyer were on one side of the table and Steve and I were on the other. I immediately looked at Epstein and stated, “We have a real fundamental, philosophical disagreement between what is right and what is wrong.”

  He leaned back and smiled and said, “No, we don’t.” Before I could say anything else, he got very serious. The most serious I had ever seen him. Playing nice had not worked, so he decided to change things up. He said, “You are being way too aggressive. You’re misunderstanding the power differential here. You even sent investigators onto my property dressed like ninjas. If you keep coming after me the way that you are, I am telling you, somebody is going to get hurt.”

  Make no mistake, this was a threat. I knew that I needed to be more careful. However, backing off was not an option.

  * * *

  Without missing a beat, we tracked down a woman named Maritza Vasquez in Miami who was a former employee of Jean-Luc’s Epstein-funded modeling agency, MC2. In June 2010, my investigator and I knocked on her front door. When she agreed to talk to us, I called a court reporter to appear at her house immediately and take a sworn statement, not knowing if we would ever get another shot at her testimony.

  While Maritza had met Jeffrey Epstein on only one occasion, she was very familiar with the inner workings of Jean-Luc Brunel’s modeling agency. She had known Jean-Luc for years. She had been hired by his prior modeling agency, Karin, as a bookkeeper in 1998. She remained with Karin until the formation of MC2 in 2003, at which time she continued to work for Brunel at the new agency.

  Maritza confirmed what we knew—that Epstein and Brunel were close friends, Brunel was living in Epstein’s apartment at 301 East Sixty-Sixth Street, and Epstein was financing MC2. Maritza knew that young models were staying in the apartments owned by Mark Epstein and rented by Jeffrey in New York City. She described Jean-Luc as a cocaine addict with an insatiable appe
tite for young girls.

  Maritza told us that Jean-Luc would bring teenage girls with him to Jeffrey’s house and that Jean-Luc would arrange young girls for Epstein when he traveled to places such as Ecuador. She explained how the modeling industry has historically provided easy access to teenage girls who would enter the country without their parents and without supervision. Maritza believed that the only reason Jeffrey Epstein was involved in MC2 was because of access to the girls; that was the only similarity between Jean-Luc and Jeffrey.

  Her statement made me pay even closer attention to Jean-Luc because I now knew that Epstein had a direct pipeline to young girls through the cover of a modeling agency. I was hot on Jean-Luc’s trail and ready to expose him as one of Epstein’s biggest enablers.

  While Jean-Luc was important, Ghislaine was still at the top of my list. Just before I was about to board the plane to New York in July 2010 for Maxwell’s deposition, I received a call from her attorney explaining that Maxwell’s mother was very ill, so Maxwell was leaving the country, with no plans to return to the United States. Sound familiar? I prepared a motion for sanctions against her, given that my travel was already booked and I had spent so much time preparing. To avoid the drama, Maxwell agreed to pay all the costs associated with my troubles, which she actually did—her attorney sent me a check. But I was still enormously bothered by the fact that she could just get on a plane, leave the country, and claim she was never returning. Mainly because on some level—every level—I knew it wasn’t true.

  Shortly after she had successfully ditched her deposition, I was in my kitchen and saw a copy of the August 2010 issue of People magazine lying on the counter. Inside was a large spread featuring Bill Clinton walking his daughter, Chelsea, down the aisle at her wedding on July 31. I picked up the magazine to read further because I knew Clinton was one of Epstein’s close friends. I looked at the picture of the father and the bride, briefly scanning the page beyond Bill and Chelsea. Holy shit, I thought. Who was front and center on the aisle? Ghislaine Maxwell. As it turned out, she didn’t leave the United States forever. For all I knew, she hadn’t left at all. But there was an important tell in this move by Epstein, too: Clearly he really didn’t want me to talk to Ghislaine.

  We knew Bill Clinton had been on Jeffrey’s private plane many times and that Jeffrey had subsequently been busted for sexual contact with minors, pleaded guilty, and gone to jail. Still, his former lover, and closest advisor, was invited to Clinton’s daughter’s wedding. How odd. I’ve never said or thought that Bill Clinton did anything wrong in connection with Ghislaine, Epstein, or their airplane rides, but by all appearances Clinton had helpful information. I couldn’t help but wonder why he wouldn’t pick up the phone and tell us what he knew?

  NINETEEN MARISSA

  WE HAD QUESTIONS FOR CLINTON, but didn’t have time to chase every lead. We were back in the office, trying to piece the intricate details of Marissa’s case together, as it was set to go to trial first.

  The court had ordered that the case be mediated, which happens in every case to give the defendant the chance to make a monetary offer and the plaintiff to accept or reject that offer. For Epstein, mediation was just another opportunity to play games. I had prepared Marissa for it. Our mediation took place on April 5, 2010. Rather than make an offer, Epstein wanted Marissa to walk away from her case to avoid further invasion of her life. It was Epstein’s way of gauging her courage. We walked out without hesitation, not allowing Epstein to get a good read. I believed then that we were actually going to get Epstein to a trial. From my perspective, trial was the only way to go in Marissa’s case because it would expose his organization.

  During the final preparations for trial, which was set for July, Epstein started to realize that he might not win this game of chicken and got worried. On June 28, 2010, he filed a motion practically begging for another mediation. We resisted it, knowing that trying the case would accomplish more in the end. But, at Epstein’s urging, the court ordered a settlement conference to take place on July 6, 2010, at the federal courthouse in Miami with ninety-two-year-old federal magistrate Judge Peter R. Palermo. Marissa was resolute; she was not going to settle for anything. There was no amount of money that could take her off the course to trial.

  In light of our belief that Epstein was using this second settlement discussion as a means to intimidate her, we filed a motion on June 30 to ensure that she would not be forced to come into contact with Epstein at the settlement conference, in keeping with the no-contact order that had been entered at his plea hearing on June 30, 2008. Taking the matter very seriously, Magistrate Palermo issued an order the very next day requiring the no-contact order to remain in full effect and directing Epstein to arrive at the federal courthouse earlier than Marissa with instruction that the parties would be dismissed separately from the settlement conference at different times. With these parameters in place, we were feeling better about our required attendance at the conference.

  On July 1, 2010, just five days before the scheduled settlement conference, I got a frantic call from Marissa. “Brad! They’re trying to kill me!” On her way to the grocery store, she noticed that an Infiniti SUV was following close behind her. When she left, the same SUV began tailing her in a much more aggressive manner, causing her to run off the side of Haverhill Road in West Palm Beach. It didn’t take much to run her off the road because she was a relatively novice driver. I knew that because I’m the one who taught her how to drive in a parking lot in Palm Beach so she could pass her driver’s license test. Nevertheless, she was scared.

  When she finally got home, the guy who had followed her was parked across the street in front of her house, intermittently flashing his high beam lights into her home. Now Marissa and her grandmother were terrified. Marissa’s one-year-old daughter huddled into her mother’s arms, trembling. Never mind a trial—Marissa thought that she was going to be killed for standing up to Epstein for too long.

  I told her to call the police while I called Mike Fisten. By the time the police arrived, they actually found Epstein’s investigator sitting in his car in the driveway and told him he had to leave her private property. In true Epstein form, the investigator just went back to the other side of the street, into the public space, and kept his lights shining through Marissa’s window. Realizing that the police weren’t going to do more, my investigator parked his car between Epstein’s investigator and the house, blocking the headlights. In fact, Mike positioned his car so he could shine his own headlights into Epstein’s investigator’s car. At the end of the shine-off, Mike was left with no choice but to take Marissa to my office in the middle of the night before checking her into a hotel where we could keep her safe. We drafted a motion to inform the court of Epstein’s intimidation, which we would file the next day.

  As Mike was leaving the hotel where he had just dropped Marissa off, he saw Epstein’s investigator walking into the hotel, looking for her. We called Marissa and had her walk down the back stairs while Epstein’s investigator was waiting in the lobby with my investigator. We were finally able to help her escape from that hotel into the car with another one of our investigators, who then took her to another hotel and watched her for days until the mediation was set to begin.

  Even though Marissa was now in a safe location, she was afraid for the safety of her daughter and her grandmother. Her entire attitude had changed, for good reason. She now wanted the case to be over at all costs. Lynn and Courtney were already scared to death, and knowing what Marissa was going through was frightening them as well. Both were calling to ask if Epstein was coming after them next and whether they were in danger. We told Lynn and Courtney to be in Miami with us on the day of Marissa’s settlement conference. That way we knew they would all be safe.

  We had been excited that a trial would finally make many of the details about Jeffrey Epstein public, which would increase the likelihood that others would come forward. But by now, all three girls had experienced serious forms of his intimidat
ion, and all three were ready for the fight to be over.

  Our clients were frightened when we arrived in Miami. When we entered the federal courthouse, because of the no-contact order, we were taken to a private elevator that I didn’t even know existed, despite having been to that courthouse many times by now. When we got out of the elevator, we were greeted by Judge Palermo’s assistant, who looked at Marissa and promised to personally make sure that she didn’t have to see Epstein. Marissa was still scared, but she was also comforted by the precautions that Judge Palermo and his staff had taken.

  When Judge Palermo came into the room to introduce himself, we quickly warned him about Epstein. Honestly, we didn’t have much confidence because we felt that no one could actually influence Epstein. He did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and no judge or anyone else was going to change that. Judge Palermo must have sensed our skepticism of him and related it in part to his age because he sharply responded, “You don’t have to worry about me being intimidated. Manuel Noriega sat right there in the same chair where Mr. Epstein will be sitting. And don’t think for a second that I am going to get worn out by this process. Last year, when I was ninety-one, I did ninety-one push-ups every day. This year, I do ninety-two.” As he finished the last word, he dropped to the floor right there and began doing push-ups just to prove the point. His grit reminded me so much of Papa that I knew he was right for this job.