Virginia got in the back and told Juan her address. Not another word was spoken all the way home. When she arrived, Virginia’s mom asked her how it had gone, and she said fine without saying much more. She spent the rest of the night in the bathroom of her parents’ house, staring in the mirror and crying. What had just happened? Was everyone like this guy? Every time I think I’ve escaped the jaws of abuse, another shark swallows me up. What do I do?
He had paid her more money than she had been paid in her entire life, for an hour of her time. By the end of the night, she had decided that there was more of a future for her with Jeffrey Epstein than in the trailer parks of West Palm Beach.
* * *
By the time she was seventeen, Virginia told us, she was traveling around with a billionaire and interacting—mostly as a sex slave—with powerful people. She was also introduced by Epstein to some of the most interesting people in the world. While traveling with Epstein on his plane on February 23, 2001, Virginia convinced Matt Groening, the famed cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons, to draw a picture of Bart Simpson on Jeffrey Epstein’s letterhead for her father. She still has the signed picture to prove it.
At the time she was traveling with Epstein and Maxwell, Virginia had a boyfriend who was relatively her age named Tony. He didn’t ask many questions, even though he knew what was going on.
There did come a time, however, when the debauched lifestyle of Epstein’s cultish world became too much for even a strong soul like Virginia. She recalled that when she was nineteen years old, after having been involved in the Epstein sex cult for two years, she was on the island with him and Maxwell when they made a new and surprising proposition to her: they wanted her to carry his baby. The duo told Virginia that she would be taken care of for the rest of her life if she would agree to give Epstein and Maxwell a child, although there were some strings attached. She would have to sign a contract agreeing that the baby was not her own, but the legal child of Epstein and Maxwell. This was the final straw for Virginia. She couldn’t bear the thought of Epstein and Maxwell raising her child. She knew that she needed to escape.
While Virginia was the first to tell me about Epstein and Maxwell’s baby proposition, she would not be the last. Two others who were propositioned with the same plan, and who didn’t know Virginia, believed then, and told me they still do to this day, that they were the only ones who were asked to do this.
It was this particular perversity that made Virginia realize just how insidious the duo was and decide that she had to escape no matter the circumstances or the risk. She needed to find a place where she would be safe because quitting her “job” and returning to her old life in Florida was not an option. Based on everything she’d seen and heard she believed that Epstein and Maxwell would hunt her down. Because she was so involved in Epstein’s trafficking operation and had accumulated knowledge of how it worked, who was in it, and the extent of their sexual abuse, she thought they would want to eliminate her, and if they decided to do that, she knew they could. She’d finally reached her “no más” moment. She was out.
Her knowledge of Epstein’s capabilities—and her fear of them—echoed those voiced by Alfredo Rodriguez after he was fired and refused to leave without his “insurance policy” of a stolen copy of Epstein’s black book of names and addresses. Indeed, many witnesses we uncovered expressed extreme fear of reprisal should Epstein ever learn they had shared information against him or Maxwell. Before meeting Epstein and Maxwell, Virginia was young and resilient. They had stolen the self-confidence and self-esteem that Virginia had managed to maintain even after being abused by Ron Eppinger and his dirty friends. Epstein and Maxwell broke her so badly that her personality crumbled to the point that she had to run as far away as she could. Escaping was survival for Virginia. But she would be back to get her revenge when she was ready.
The time had come. After having three children and spending a decade rebuilding her once-resilient personality, she was finally back in the United States and ready to fight. She saw the CVRA as her chance to seek justice. That was not her only mission, though. In addition to her strong desire to help overturn Epstein’s immunity deal, she returned with an idea to start a charitable foundation where any money raised would go to help other survivors. One of the things that Virginia felt was missing was a well-known hub that could be accessed by phone or internet at any time from anywhere by a victim or survivor who needed shelter, clothing, or other necessities. She wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted to escape was able to do that through the resources that she could provide. The concept was inspiring. So, Brittany and I helped her incorporate and start her charity. Virginia named her organization Victims Refuse Silence (cleverly incorporating her initials).
Virginia now had a purpose in life and a never-say-die attitude to back it up.
TWENTY-NINE NOBODY IS SAFE
FROM THE OUTSET OF THE Crime Victims’ Rights Act case, Paul Cassell and I had requested copies of all the written communications between the government and Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers regarding the NPA, thinking that, like in any other typical case, there were probably half a dozen emails exchanged between the two parties. When the government spent half a decade putting up a huge fight to prevent the disclosure of the documents, Paul and I realized that there must be something unusual in there. Epstein filed formal papers with the court to intervene in the case so that he could help the government work against the victims to stop us from seeing the emails, too. These documents contained the key to our case.
Despite the government and Epstein working together against us, Judge Marra still ruled in our favor on June 18, 2013, granting us the rights not only to see the correspondence between the government and Epstein but also to use said correspondence to prove our case. On June 27, 2013, Epstein appealed Judge Marra’s order to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia. Epstein’s lawyer Marty Weinberg argued his (and the government’s) position before the appellate court, and Paul gave a brilliant performance on behalf of our clients. After the argument but before the Eleventh Circuit decided, Epstein, sensing they would lose the argument, called me to discuss our personal lawsuit before switching gears and bringing up the issue relating to the emails with the government.
He explained that he hadn’t been able to find any law on this idea, but that he had intervened in this part of the CVRA case and was wondering if it was possible to settle pieces of the case without resolving the whole thing. I asked him what he was talking about and he said that he wasn’t offering to do anything, but just thinking out loud whether he wanted to buy a position in a lawsuit (where he would pay an agreed amount of money so that my clients would stop trying to obtain the emails and continue the case without that evidence).
“Do you want me to answer your question or skip ahead and answer what you’re really asking?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I follow,” he responded.
“Yes, you do—you want to pay for us to abandon our pursuit of the correspondence between you and the government and have framed it as whether it is permissible to pay for such a thing. I don’t know whether its permissible or not, but regardless of whether that legal maneuver is allowed in any context, we would never accept it,” I explained.
His question did mean one thing: these documents were as important as we thought they were.
As predicted, we won the appeal. On June 11, 2014, the Eleventh Circuit upheld Judge Marra’s decision and required the government to turn over the documents, which consisted of hundreds of emails spanning the duration of the negotiation of Epstein’s plea deal with the federal government. This prompted an unbelievable game of the government hiding the ball and refusing to produce documents in entirety. It took months for them to do so.
By October 2014, we finally had the universe of documents that we were going to get from the government. Before we could do anything with it, though, we needed to organize and read thousands and thousands of pages that had been handed over to us in sporadic, di
sjointed, and out-of-order document dumps over time. I had just finished a big trial. I was exhausted. But this project needed to get done. I sat down in the conference room with probably five Bankers boxes filled with documents, setting out on a mission to put every single piece of paper into chronological order.
Up to now, I had not really involved anyone from my office in this case. Other than the six months that I was at RRA, I did everything on my own, with extensive help from Paul Cassell on all legal pleadings. But with the way in which the government produced documents, it was like playing fifty-two-card pick-up. It was impossible for one person to put all of this into the order that my mind needed to see it in the short time we needed it done.
Out of desperation more than anything, I asked our brand-new law clerk, Brittany Henderson, who was still in law school, to help me out.
I explained the project and the purpose, and before I could even finish my explanation, Brittany was on top of it. She went and got tabs, her laptop, highlighters, yellow pads, and within seconds devised a plan to organize the documents for future purposes. We spent the next three days from sunrise to midnight in the conference room, taking only five or six hours to go home and sleep each night.
This wasn’t just a matter of putting things into chronological order. Once the order had been established, we each read every single page from beginning to end, tabbing and labeling the significance of each and identifying what the government failed to produce. Our review revealed deep efforts between Epstein and the government to work out a secret deal with the goal of saving Epstein and his friends from prosecution, and to do that without the victims ever knowing what had happened. It was crazy.
At one point in time, the government was playing it straight, doing what it should, abiding by the law and legal process. By May 2007, the FBI had thoroughly investigated Epstein, which led to the United States Attorney’s Office preparing an eighty-two-page prosecution memo and a fifty-three-page indictment against him, which was never filed. Shortly thereafter, on July 6, 2007, Alan Dershowitz authored a twenty-four-page letter along with Gerald Lefcourt on behalf of Epstein. In it, they explained that Epstein generously supported the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, seemingly in an effort to curry favor with the government and make it clear just how important Epstein was. No coincidence, the letter also threw in that Epstein was one of the founding members of the Clinton Global Initiative, making his connection with Bill Clinton rather prominent.
And then, boom. All of a sudden, an honest investigation switched to the government and Epstein working together in concert, and in secret.
Before seeing the documents, we knew that the non-prosecution agreement had been signed by Epstein and the government on September 24, 2007. We also knew that until July 2008, the victims still believed that Jeffrey Epstein was going to be federally prosecuted. What we were now learning was just how much effort the government put into working with Epstein to violate the rights of his victims by keeping the NPA secret. After our review of the documents, we knew we could prove the victims’ rights had been intentionally violated by the government.
As we were going through the documents, I would flip to one and say, “Oh my god, can you believe this?” It started to happen so frequently it seemed like we were talking more than reading. Every page was worse than the last.
These discoveries, while shocking, were not much worse than what I’d envisioned, and by this point in my career, I was not naive to the fact that money could buy corruption. But it was too much for Brittany to believe. I read one particular email aloud before I handed it to her. “Look, the prosecutor admits in this one that they had ‘compiled a list of thirty-four confirmed minors.’ They even said, ‘There are six others, whose names we already have, who need to be interviewed by the FBI to confirm whether they were seventeen or eighteen at the time of their activity with Mr. Epstein.’ ”
Brittany grabbed the email and quietly began to compare it with the one in her other hand: “But wait, on September 15, 2007, AUSA Marie Villafaña emailed Epstein’s lawyers that she had ‘gotten some negative reaction to the assault charge with Sarah Kellen as the victim, since she is considered one of the main perpetrators of the offenses that we planned to charge in the indictment.’ I don’t understand. This doesn’t make any sense. These emails were written nine days apart. The government says right here, in writing, that they had identified at least thirty-four minor victims. They had such an easy case. Why are they talking about some random assault charge against an adult? They wanted to charge Epstein with a crime he may or may not have committed against an adult instead of any of the crimes that he actually did commit against minors? One of his own co-conspirators? What about the victims? Why wouldn’t they just charge him with one of the crimes that they prepared an indictment for? The crimes they can prove he committed? Why would they spend any time at all looking for other crimes?”
I looked at the emails and said, “Well, for whatever reason, it’s pretty clear that instead of charging Epstein for a crime related to the minors, the government was trying to find a punishment that would be acceptable to Epstein and then back into that punishment with a manufactured charge.”
“What?!” Brittany yelled in genuine disbelief. “Can the government do this? How can they do this? How can you just make up some random crime to charge someone with and completely ignore the fact that thirty-four children were actually sexually assaulted? What about all the real charges? What about all of the kids he hurt? Can lawyers get arrested for this?”
Before I could even start to answer her questions, she continued to read further down in the email about the Sarah Kellen assault charge: “The government wanted to construct a conspiracy around ‘hearsay evidence that [Virginia Roberts] traveled on Mr. Epstein’s airplane when she was under eighteen, in around the 2000 or 2001 time frame.’ ” From a place of increasing shock, Brittany said, ‘Construct a conspiracy’?! There was a conspiracy! They knew that Virginia flew on the airplane when she was underage. Of course they knew why Virginia was on that airplane. What was there to construct?!”
I had seen this email before. I had felt the same feelings that Brittany was feeling. The whole thing had been shocking to me for six years by this point.
“What about the fact that she was actually being sexually abused when she was under eighteen?! Seriously, Brad, why would they have to construct a charge? There are so many charges for so many girls—for forty girls!” she blurted out, talking a mile a minute.
I replied, “Here, you’ll love this one. On September 16, 2007, the prosecutor emailed Epstein’s attorney and said, ‘[o]n an “avoid the press” note, I believe that Mr. Epstein’s airplane was in Miami on the day of the [co-conspirator] telephone call. If he was in Miami-Dade County at the time, then I can file the charge in the district court in Miami, which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly.’ ”
“Seems like the government really thought of everything they could to try to help Epstein get away with this. I just don’t understand why,” she said, exasperated.
I explained the best I could: “You’re right. We can see what they want to accomplish—make this all go away for Epstein with as little consequence as possible. The problem they were having is that Epstein only committed very serious crimes against each of these minor victims. If they even attempted to charge a misdemeanor against him for one or more, the victim would get the chance to speak in court, which would likely blow up their whole plan because the judge would learn more about the real facts of the case and reject the plea deal. They needed a cooperative victim. The most obvious choice was one of Epstein’s co-conspirators. To help the government out with this plan, you see the emails from Epstein’s lawyers telling the government that when Epstein learned the FBI was attempting to serve important subpoenas on Nadia Marcinkova and Sarah Kellen, Epstein committed a physical assault against both of them to cause them not to cooperate. Those assaults could form the basis for misd
emeanor charges on behalf of victims who would not provide the judge with information that could disrupt the plan to close the case. If we keep reading, I bet I can find the evidence that I’m talking about.”
We kept working, and at two in the morning, I found the email proving my point in one of the last boxes. I handed it to Brittany. “Can you imagine what the judge would think if he ever saw that the AUSA told Epstein’s attorneys, ‘I will include our standard language regarding resolving all criminal liability and I will mention “co-conspirators,” but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all of the other persons that we could charge.’ ”
“Are you joking?!” she exclaimed. “The government worked with Epstein to make sure that the judge would never learn how many crimes and people they could charge… Seriously?!”
The amount of evidence was overwhelming, and her frustration only grew with each new damning revelation. I could barely get a word in.
But her comments were exactly the same as mine would have been had I seen these emails at the time when I was scribbling the word Emergency on the top of that motion in 2008. By now I was somewhat numb to the facts, although still angry and resolute. For Brittany, these were fresh wounds. She was “brand-new” mad. This was not just a first project for a young, soon-to-be lawyer. This was much more. The anger and frustration that she felt reviewing these documents inspired the direction of her legal career. She was now as committed to this as I was.
After hours of combing through documents, she finally came across something that shocked me. “Listen to this—Epstein’s lawyers and the government put together a joint letter to a judge in Miami in October 2007 saying, ‘the United States has identified forty young women who can be characterized as victims.… Some of those women went to Mr. Epstein’s home only once, some went there as much as one hundred times or more. Some of the women’s conduct was limited to performing a topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself. For other women, the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse.’ ” As she was expressing her shock over the fact that the “women” being referred to in this joint letter were actually minor children whom everyone knew Epstein had victimized, I remembered something that one of his lawyers had said to the media earlier the same year that the letter was written.
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