His call set off a bunch of suspicions for me that something was wrong. Sure enough, I got a call from him around the same time the next night—I must have forgotten to tell him that midnight on a weekend was not my preferred time to talk—but I stayed on the line. This time, his approach was slightly different. In the past twenty-four hours, he said, he had confirmed what I had told him. He felt confident that I knew all the characters involved here, and if he was going to get involved in any of this litigation, working with me was probably the best way for him and his colleagues to go.
I didn’t know Stan, but I knew David Boies by reputation and found the thought of working with him intriguing. He was actually one of the lawyers who had unknowingly helped to shape my legal career. When I returned to Florida from my time studying abroad in the Czech Republic after my first year of law school, I had three weeks to kill before going back for my second year. My dad hooked me up with a law firm clerkship through a fishing buddy of his who was an admiralty lawyer in Jacksonville.
Having hired me only as a favor, the firm made it clear to me on my first day that, considering my lack of skills, they had no use for me. But, wanting to help me out, they asked what kind of law I wanted to practice. I told them I wanted to be a trial lawyer. They told me there was a guy trying a case down the street for the next three weeks and said they would pay me if I wanted to go to court and watch him.
I went to the trial and sat in the back of a Jacksonville courtroom that was filled with stacks of Bankers boxes. David Boies represented an electricity company called Florida Power & Light, which was in a contract dispute. I was the first person to arrive at the courtroom every day and watched everything he did for three weeks.
I still remember a few things about that trial. Boies’s cross-examinations were very short, with a clear point to every question. I also remember a tactic he used repeatedly. When a witness was answering a question in a way that was not favorable to his client, David would start the next question by saying, “Let me make sure that we are communicating,” and rephrase the question and steer the witness onto a totally different topic—one more favorable to his position. It was brilliant. I stole that device, among other things, from David’s style.
Watching how he took over the courtroom solidified my view that this was exactly the type of lawyer I wanted to be. I told David this story fifteen years later, thinking he would be able to put a face to this person who was sitting in the back of the courtroom every day and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember you, too.” He had absolutely no recollection of me (although he certainly remembered the case; I had to go back to law school before the trial was over, but apparently he lost). In any event, I found it cool that now, years later, maybe he wanted my help.
On our second late-night call, Stan thanked me for my help and told me that if anything ever came up, he would like to work with me and said David Boies would, too. He then asked me if I had anything else in the works against Epstein, so I told him a little bit about the current status of the CVRA case. This led to a long conversation about the breadth of the criminal enterprise headed by Jeffrey Epstein and my ultimate goal to overturn Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement with the feds.
He then reminded me that he was the former U.S. assistant attorney general and that David and his law firm were well regarded by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York and around the country. He said, “What you’re doing is admirable. Your goal is to get Epstein prosecuted. But rather than try to undo this bad deal”—referring to the NPA—“isn’t there anyone you represent who has traveled on Epstein’s plane or been abused at any of his other locations?” I found the question unnerving, especially given the timing of his call and my current talks with Virginia. I’m admittedly quick to be suspicious, but my mind was racing.
The logic stacking up at that moment was simple. This powerful person who was closely associated with David Boies, one of the most powerful lawyers in America, had called me at midnight at my home, I suspected, under the pretense of representing someone whom I knew no longer had a case. And now, seemingly out of the blue, he’d asked a question the answer to which was Virginia Roberts. Hardly anyone knew that she was in the United States, and they certainly didn’t know that I was talking to her. What were these two guys up to?
Epstein had scared Virginia into another country years ago and, but for the Sharon Churcher articles in the Daily Mail that came and went in 2011, Virginia had gone back into hiding. Was Stan working with Epstein? Was David? Had Epstein tagged Virginia’s passport in order to receive a ping from the Justice Department if she ever entered the country? Despite these thoughts, which were a bit frantic, I told Stan that I had recently been contacted by Virginia Roberts and divulged parts of her story that had already been made public. But nothing else.
A couple of days passed, and Stan called again. “David and I would like to meet with you. How soon can you fly to New York?” I gave him a proposed itinerary. He told me to call him when I landed, and he would tell me where to meet them. Waiting until the last minute to figure out where to have lunch is not an unusual thing for people to do in New York, but given my lurking suspicions, I found it odd. It smelled like an Epstein setup.
I didn’t have time to figure out a more elaborate solution to my worries, so I went to a local spy shop in Fort Lauderdale and asked for the best hidden recording device they had. They gave me a specialized recording device that looked like a USB flash drive and could make high-quality recordings up to four hours long.
Thinking that I was headed for a setup, I tried to remember any connections I was aware of between Jeffrey Epstein and his friends that might have tied him to David Boies’s law firm. I looked through Alfredo Rodriguez’s journal and couldn’t find David. Next, I reviewed copies of the message pads that had been confiscated from the trash pulls at Epstein’s house. I paged through calls from former national security advisor Sandy Berger, former United States senator George Mitchell, and movie producer Harvey Weinstein (more than a decade before he would be arrested on rape charges). I continued flipping through the messages and then, there it was—a call from David Boies. According to a message pad, he had called Jeffrey Epstein’s house on February 25, 2005. There was no message associated with the call, only a handwritten note that someone named David Boies had personally called and left his cell phone number, asking that Jeffrey call him back. Was this a benign thing? A return business call to a business call placed by Epstein? Or was he, as I feared, Epstein’s lawyer? A spy? There was only one way to find out.
I landed at LaGuardia and called Stan’s cell phone for directions, as instructed. He wanted to meet somewhere where we could talk privately, without a lot of noise, so he suggested the Harvard Club. He said he was on his way and to tell the front desk when I arrived.
When I got there, I definitely was on unfamiliar turf. First, the concierge sent me to a coat room and the clerk took my backpack. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted it. Club rules, of course: guests in the club were prevented from taking briefcases, luggage, or backpacks to their tables. This was definitely not a place for a public school kid from Jacksonville.
I had never met Stan, so I had researched everything that was publicly available about him before the meeting. He had worked on Wall Street for a while and was a bestselling author in addition to having had his early career at the Department of Justice in Washington. Notably, while he was assistant attorney general, Stan had cross-examined the associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, in front of a 1976 federal grand jury, and discovered that Felt was “Deep Throat,” the infamous secret informant of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s during the Watergate scandal and a key figure in forcing the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Aside from Stan’s professional information, I found out that he had political connections, and had dated women with public profiles like Kathie Lee Gifford, Connie Chung, and Gloria Steinem.
There were many media reports describing Jeffrey Epstein as this mysterious person with alleged ti
es to the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and political figures, and now I was meeting with this other mysterious person about whom I knew nothing. My gut kept saying I needed to be cautious. Stan could be a Jeffrey Epstein plant.
I showed up on time and Stan wasn’t there. I continued to scan the room, making fun of all of these superior snobs in my head, waiting for an imperious attendant to either ask me what I was doing there or put me in a waiter’s jacket and make me start serving hors d’oeuvres.
At this point, I expected to see Stan coming in wearing a vest and an attitude, but when he showed up, he had neither. Then again, wouldn’t someone who wasn’t stuffy be exactly the kind of person Epstein would have recruited?
Stan apologized immediately for having us meet in a club like this but said it provided privacy. Privacy was standard operating procedure for two lawyers talking about a case, of course, but I saw it differently: What was this meeting really about?
As we headed for a less formal dining area, suddenly I thought: Oh no, the USB thumb drive recorder is still in my backpack. If Stan was going to threaten me in this “place of privacy,” I would have no evidence of it. Once again, my mind started racing.
We sat at the table and he launched into the purpose of our meeting. Still panicking, I told him that I needed to go to the bathroom. He must have been wondering, What the heck is wrong with this guy? He’s been waiting for me for fifteen minutes and now he has to go to the bathroom? I walked back to the coatroom and dug through my backpack to find the recorder before heading back to the lunch table.
When I got back, I planned to force Stan to talk about his past before he could get into anything that he could use on behalf of Epstein. I asked him about Watergate and Mark Felt because, who were we kidding, that’s cool stuff. He told me how, after his cross-examination of Felt, one of the jurors had asked Felt if he was Deep Throat. Stan stopped Felt from answering. He then walked up to Felt and privately told him that either he could answer the question, which he would have to do honestly since he was under oath, or Stan would withdraw the question as being irrelevant to the investigation. Felt’s face turned white and uncharacteristically frightened before he immediately asked Stan to withdraw the question. Stan knew right then that Mark Felt was Deep Throat. He kept that secret for decades until Mark revealed his identity in Vanity Fair in 2005. Felt died in 2008.
I spent most of the lunch interrogating Stan about his past and present, making him comfortable, until he volunteered that he had known Epstein. He had worked with him briefly many years before. Really? Stan explained that after he’d left the Justice Department in Washington, he’d worked as an investment banker in New York, where a client introduced him to Epstein. They were not in the same firm, but the two of them had shared an office for a few weeks. He may have thought he was being candid and forthcoming, but all it did was ramp up my suspicions.
I asked if David knew Jeffrey, and Stan said as far as he knew, the answer was no. At this point, Stan really wasn’t doing anything to dispel my concerns, since I knew that in the past David had left a private message for Jeffrey to call him.
Stan wanted to talk about Epstein, but I delayed that. When we finished eating, I told Stan it didn’t make much sense for me to explain things twice, once to him and once to David, so why didn’t we ask David to come join us? Stan suggested instead that we go to David’s office. I got my backpack and we jumped in a cab to 575 Lexington Avenue. But this merely raised another red flag. David’s office was in the same building as Jeffrey Epstein’s main attorney Darren Indyke’s office.
Darren Indyke had attended important hearings as well as my depositions of Epstein over the years. He wasn’t a litigator, more like a fixer. Indyke had one client: Jeffrey Epstein. Now I was in a cab going to his office building in Manhattan. How many coincidences was I supposed to choke down before they were no longer coincidences?
In the building lobby, the two security guards knew Stan but asked for my driver’s license. Stan signaled to the guards that I was okay, and they opened the electronic gate to let us in. Stan led the way into the elevator and up to the seventh floor. When we checked in, the receptionist said we were supposed to use a particular conference room, as if it had already been arranged. Stan had acted as if we were only meeting at the Harvard Club, yet he had already reserved a conference room at Boies Schiller Flexner? Again, it was odd.
I know that this seems crazy, but at that time, I was thinking that a conference room in a highly reputable law firm would be a strange place for Epstein to cause me bodily harm. So I had crossed his plans to kill me off the list. Still, with all I had been through, this had the markings of some larger plot that I must not have conceptualized yet. I couldn’t figure out how he and Boies intended to piece it together.
Here’s the other thing: I didn’t even meet David that day. Stan told me that we were going there to meet him, but when we got there David was said to be tied up with other things.
In the conference room, Stan said he appreciated all that I had done for Epstein’s abuse victims and that David and his partners only wanted to help. He asked me to tell him more about the CVRA and what Jeffrey Epstein did to Virginia in jurisdictions other than Florida. Instead of answering, I pulled out the message pads that I had in my backpack and went to the flagged page where David Boies had called Epstein’s house in 2005. I put it in front of Stan and made the point that this call had probably been received between sexual massages that Epstein was getting that day from underage girls. It was clear from Stan’s reaction, though, that he’d never seen this before and didn’t know about it. He did confirm that the number was David’s cellphone number.
I told him that this made me uneasy about the whole situation and I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever relationship there may have been between David and Jeffrey. Stan left the room for about ten minutes. During this break, I made sure that my recording device was still on. He came back and told me that David would not be able to meet with us. We spent the remainder of the meeting playing cat and mouse, neither learning much.
I left the office for LaGuardia very confused. If these were Jeffrey Epstein stand-ins, they had gotten no information from me. On the other hand, I really didn’t get much information from them, either. I don’t believe in coincidences, and had sufficient reason to believe that Stan, and perhaps David, was secretly working for the other side. However, these high-profile, powerful lawyers operating in the shadows on behalf of a large, successful law firm in order to contrive an elaborate plot to rope me in under false pretenses to frame me on behalf of a pedophile—that just didn’t make sense.
I spent the airplane ride home writing down all the facts and separately all the “logical” conclusions I was drawing from them. By the time I had landed, I decided that Stan and David had to be on the right side with good intentions and that there was no grand conspiracy here after all. But man, they had certainly made me nervous. Or to be more accurate, Epstein had made me nervous. He was able to do that because he could control anyone, and I knew it.
TWENTY-SEVEN BACK TO NEW YORK
ALTHOUGH I HAD NOT TOLD him that Virginia was in the country, Stan kept in touch, and expressed that he and David wanted to meet her. We set up a date in July 2014 for her and me to fly from Florida to New York for a meeting.
The entire plane ride up, I was picking Virginia’s brain about the time she spent with her “dysfunctional family” from 2000 to 2002. She was confident that Epstein’s New York butler Jojo Fontanilla would not only remember her but also cooperate with her against Epstein. She told me of a time before her eighteenth birthday when she was in Epstein’s New York house in extraordinary pain. Jojo drove her, with Epstein and Maxwell, to a nearby hospital, where a medical team attended to her immediately. Jojo had been there for her then and always would be.
We spent three hours shuffling through hundreds of pages of evidence from the Epstein investigation. Before we landed, I asked her how she felt about tracking Jojo down to see what he
lp he would give. She said she would do whatever it took to move the case forward. Our flight arrived at LaGuardia at noon. We had four hours to kill before our meeting with David and Stan.
We took a cab from JFK straight to East Seventy-First Street. As we walked toward Central Park, Virginia looked to the right and instantly reacquainted herself with the mansion that sprawled across nearly an entire city block. It was obvious that she had been there many times: she recognized every square inch of the place from the outside in.
The plan was for her to knock on the front door and ask for Jojo. Her fantasy was that he would come down the stairs and give her a big hug before saying he’d cooperate with her and thank her for coming and saving him from his indentured servitude. She believed he was a good person who would choose the right side over money.
As we walked down the sidewalk, coming closer to the door, she described the inside of the various portions of the house that we were passing. We approached the front door and saw video cameras outside. She described a video room where all the live images were monitored and recorded and stored for a certain period of time.
I told her to look down to avoid her facial capture by the cameras. As we walked under the main security bulb, she looked up, against my advice, and extended both of her middle fingers, hoping that Epstein would eventually see the footage. It was a double f*** you, impulsive and straight from her heart. But when I looked at her, she had tears streaming down her face and I knew we couldn’t stop at the front door. We walked to the end of the block.
Virginia told me it was better for her to go to the door alone, and I agreed. I handed her the USB recording device and she put it in her top shirt pocket. I waited across the street and watched as she walked up to the giant front door and started knocking. I was standing behind a car in front of the public library, close enough to see her but far enough to not be seen.
Relentless Pursuit Page 21
