I decided to at least respond to her email and invite her over to the office. In many regards, our first meeting was like all the others I’d had with reporters who claimed to want to do what Julie was saying she wanted to do. I had accumulated all of the evidence in these cases and done all of the work. Unable to imagine the scope of that decade-long task, or how voluminous the materials were and how complicated piecing it together really was, Julie, like other reporters, wanted to start with my just spoon-feeding her everything and making it simple.
I wasn’t about to do that. Not because I didn’t want to help, but because that approach wouldn’t get her or me where we wanted to go. Her goal, she said, was to give the public the chance to hear from the victims themselves and to expose how the legal system and the media had failed them. Sure, I could have just let her interview several of my clients and put it into a story. But she would not have put any time into the story herself, so she wouldn’t appreciate the necessary complexities. In turn, the result wouldn’t be very good. Before she left my office, I told her I would help.
I made a list of things that she could review to understand the facts as well as the defenses that had been lodged against us, the labels that had been attached to the victims, and the bullying tactics that had allowed the bad guys to control the message in the past.
With my list as a guide, I told her where to go to find each public filing and piece of the case against Epstein on her own. I told her who to serve with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and where to get the pleadings that contained information she would find useful. Most reporters, I think, would have decided to focus on a short-term aspect of the story or begged for blind victim interviews. To Julie’s credit, she didn’t fall into that trap. She followed the road map and stayed on course.
At the beginning of her investigation, Julie was shocked by what she was finding. At other times, she was amazed. She would call me to ask questions, and her questions were good. She cared about getting the answers right. When I told her where to look to cross-check something, she would typically call back the same day to verify what I had told her. Often during that process she would, of course, discover other information that I had known at some point but had forgotten. As much as I was helping her with her story, if the end product was half-decent it would be enormously valuable to my clients’ pursuit of justice.
FORTY-FIVE COIN TOSS
AROUND THE TIME THE MAXWELL case ended, the partners in my law firm—Farmer, Jaffe, Weissing, Edwards, Fistos & Lehrman—were going in different directions.
All of us had risen from the ashes that Scott Rothstein had left behind and built a respected boutique law firm in Fort Lauderdale. Over eight years, we had created something that every one of us was proud of. But now, it was clear, it was on its way out—dying not for bad reasons but for good ones. Gary Farmer was now a Florida state senator with a life devoted to Florida politics, spending much of his time in Tallahassee. Steve Jaffe was ready to move on from the national networking in the class action area to the next phase of his career as a mediator. One way or another, changes had happened for us all.
We were all still friends, but I wanted to run my own firm my own way. It was bittersweet for me when we decided to split up—I was sad to see it end, but excited to start my new firm.
By this time, I was representing crime victims in high-profile cases around the country and trying a wide variety of civil cases. I felt that my core trial team was the best at what we did. As we were organizing the new firm, I got a crazy idea, one of those ideas you have to run past other people you trust before you act on it. Brittany was in the conference room with Maria Kelljchian, our exceptional paralegal. Maria was the other person in our legal universe I trusted. Neither Brittany nor Maria was shy about giving me her opinions, especially if they were criticizing my ideas. So I asked, “What do you think about the idea of us having a New York office and asking Stan Pottinger if he wants to be my law partner?” Both reacted almost immediately with reasons why they thought it would be a great fit.
But look: Stan, in my view, was David Boies’s personal 007. Not that either of them would put it that way, but I did. I thought that there was a pretty good chance that my proposition could make Stan laugh—though he’d be too diplomatic to do that out loud. I mean, who was I kidding? But I didn’t have much time to game the idea. My old firm was winding down fast and I was trying to do a million things to get the new one started.
It took Stan no time to say, “I’m in.” David Boies, he said, had told him long ago that forming a small firm had many appealing advantages and tempted virtually all lawyers at one time or another. But there was that inescapable problem to solve, and Stan brought it up: “Now we have to decide whose name goes first.” I told him that I really didn’t care, and I meant it. He said he felt the same way. He took out a quarter and said, “Heads or tails?”
I said, “Heads, of course.”
He flipped the coin, put it on the back of his hand, and said without showing it to me, “You win, Edwards Pottinger it is.” I still wonder whether the coin landed on heads or tails. He knows, of course, but he’ll never tell me. He did once say, though, “The future belongs to you, m’boy, and the name of the firm should show it.”
In December 2017, our new firm, in both Fort Lauderdale and New York City, was off and running.
* * *
We turned back to my ongoing malicious prosecution case against Epstein, knowing that the trial date would be here in just a few months. To win, we had to prove that Epstein knew that he had made knowingly false allegations in the complaint he filed against me many years prior. One of his allegations was that I took the depositions of his pilots and aggressively sought the flight logs of his private planes even though he said I knew that no underage girls had been on his plane. The wacky conclusion he drew in the complaint from this assertion was that I could only have been in aggressive pursuit of the pilots and logs because I wanted to further the RRA Ponzi scheme.
This, of course, was all untrue. Epstein knew there were underage girls on his plane and that I had the proof. On top of the flight logs, Epstein knew I was now Virginia’s attorney, something he didn’t predict happening when he made the false allegations. Virginia could conclusively establish that Epstein’s premise was knowingly false because she was one of the minors who had traveled on Epstein’s plane for the purpose of being sexually victimized.
Once the Florida Supreme Court ruled in my favor to let my case proceed against Epstein, Epstein’s attorneys asked immediately to take Virginia’s deposition. I guess they thought she might resist a deposition because her case against Maxwell had just settled and she was safely back in Australia. Who—even Virginia—would now want to get involved in this Epstein-Edwards saga? The answer was… Virginia. Epstein’s team’s hope that her commitment had dwindled could not have been more wrong. Over the years, she knew that I was not only her lawyer but also the subject of Epstein’s bullying and intimidation. If there was a fight in which she felt her voice could make a difference, she was all in. I had stood up for her, and she would be there for me. Epstein and his team had underestimated us.
In October 2017, Virginia flew from Australia to the United States for her deposition in my case against Jeffrey Epstein. Once Epstein’s attorneys realized that she was going to show up, and after she was already on the ground in the United States, they canceled her deposition. Epstein was no idiot; he knew Virginia too well. He, too, knew this was not the testimony he wanted.
We had already flown up to New York for Virginia’s deposition. Even though it was canceled, we weren’t simply going to put Virginia on a plane and send her back to Australia. Instead, Stan, Brittany, Sigrid, and I took her out to dinner at Trattoria Dell’Arte in midtown Manhattan. The whole group was on a high. Virginia’s life was finally settling down in Australia after the media attention and spotlight had been on her for at least six years. We had just called their bluff on wanting to depose Virginia. My lawsui
t had been revitalized. Stan and I were starting our new law firm. We were discovering new witnesses with new details about Epstein’s sex-fueled organization all the time, which would allow us to one day do something with that information. Everything was falling into place.
Anyone looking at the table from outside would never know what we had all been through together, or the serious subject matter that had brought us there that night. We looked like a bunch of friends who had known each other forever, cracking jokes and telling stories. While Brittany was playing her normal role of asking Stan a million questions about whether he was in the Secret Service or MI6 or the CIA or some such thing, Stan was busy putting on a show for her amusement. With an unseen party behind him, he accidentally backhanded a glass of wine off the table and into the lap of the gentleman sitting behind us.
Stan apologized profusely, and the well-humored man at the other table was totally cool. The story we were telling at our own table was so funny that the flying wineglass became part of it. Everyone at our table and the other one was laughing uncontrollably. Mid-routine, Stan realized that he knew this guy—of course he did—from some prior life. He was David Letterman’s announcer, Alan Kalter. No wonder, we thought, that he was so funny and good-humored. He’d endured ribbings from Letterman for years.
The scene that we were causing in the restaurant now was nothing short of a spectacle. Brittany, without missing a beat, left the table and disappeared. We thought she was looking for someone to clean up the spilled wine, but shortly after her return, three different birthday cakes were carted out to our table with massive sparklers shooting fire and flames out everywhere.
Everyone at the table was looking around, trying to figure out what was going on, until all three cakes were placed directly in front of Stan. Brittany began to sing “Happy Birthday” to him, even though, of course, it was not his birthday. But it was a smooth way on Brittany’s part to handle the wine-spilling situation. Stan turned around and gave Kalter a whole birthday cake with a sparkler still fired up. Kalter had been fabulous from the start, and now he was even more so, joining into what was a fake birthday celebration but a celebration nonetheless. Everyone at both our tables sang “Happy Birthday” to Stan as the rest of the restaurant took a New York glimpse.
This fake birthday celebration started a ridiculous tradition we have followed ever since. Brittany has never gone to a restaurant with Stan without celebrating a fake birthday. Whether in New York or in Florida, in Ricky’s, our favorite chicken wing shack (my choice) or a great restaurant in the city like Cipriani’s (Stan’s), it is always Stan’s birthday and there is some celebration that inevitably draws in the other people in the restaurant. Funny how that works, but it does. And no matter how many times it happens, Stan is still caught off guard (or pretends to be). If he had birthdays as often as we celebrated them, he would be two hundred years old.
At the end of that night, I knew this was going to be a great partnership. The craziest part is that neither Brittany nor I have any idea when his actual birthday is. We figure it doesn’t really matter since we celebrate it every time we see him.
FORTY-SIX BRING IT ON
IN LIGHT OF THE UPCOMING malicious prosecution trial, Epstein changed his legal team, yet again. In the background, he still had the same lawyers advising him at the top: Marty Weinberg, Darren Indyke, the lawyers at Steptoe & Johnson, the lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis, and a handful of other firms. There was no end to the lawyers he could afford, and no end to his tactics to delay the trial. His lead trial counsel now was Scott Link and Kara Rockenbach from the Florida firm Link & Rockenbach.
As an aside, proving that we live in a small world, Kara Rockenbach had recently divorced Bard Rockenbach, whose firm had served as my appellate counsel and helped me win my case at the Florida Supreme Court. Link & Rockenbach was a brand-new law firm that had started up with one big client—Jeffrey Epstein. They spent every waking hour on this case, knowing that Epstein wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Judge Hafele was quick to set the trial in my case for December 2017 with a strict instruction that there would be no continuances. Despite that and despite the judge’s authority, I knew right away that his ruling was never going to stick because the system just wasn’t prepared for a litigant like Jeff Epstein and his extraordinary ability to manipulate everyone and everything. Still, by this point, Judge Hafele knew that he was the one who’d sent the case up on appeal and that the longer he let it sit around, the better the chances were that Epstein would use his money and resources to keep the case languishing forever. So the judge was very stern.
Link & Rockenbach, brand new to the case, first explained that they needed to take my deposition. This would not have been a big deal if this were the first, or second, or even third time that my deposition had been taken, but this one would be the fourth. Scott Link was asking for seven hours with me, and since so much time had passed since my last deposition, the court allowed it.
In 2017, the deposition landscape was different from before for many reasons. In a way, I was now much more comfortable and accustomed to being in the witness chair. But the case had begun eight years prior, and had been on appeal for so long that the passage of time itself had become an issue. A deposition should be easy, right? Just tell the truth. But it wasn’t humanly possible to remember every single detail of a litigation that had spun off into many related cases, from the CVRA case to dozens of cases against Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of victims; to my defamation case against Dershowitz; to representing Virginia against Ghislaine Maxwell; to representing Sarah Ransome against Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and Groff; and to this personal battle with Jeffrey that had itself spanned the entire range of directions that any case could travel.
In this case alone we’d had multiple claims, multiple counterclaims, the dismissal of the original claim, the dismissal of the counterclaim, Epstein’s retention of at least five different law firms, and movement of the case from the trial court to an appellate court to the Florida Supreme Court and back down to the original court for trial.
Nobody knew the details as well as I did. But there were many details that I didn’t know as well in 2017 as I had in 2009. I also didn’t know Scott Link. I knew he’d been hired with the singular purpose of getting as much ammunition against me as he could and to attack me from every angle possible.
Before this deposition, I reviewed the prior three. Reading those transcripts brought me back to the first one. It had been taken March 23, 2010, just four months after I’d been served with Epstein’s complaint alleging my partnership with Rothstein in the Ponzi scheme. Epstein was trying to show maximum intimidation that day. The deposition had been held in Jack Scarola’s office and we were told that Bob Critton, Epstein’s lawyer at the time, was going to take it.
Jack and I had walked into the conference room where the deposition was to be held. There was a large video camera at one end shooting down toward the other end with a blue backdrop and a chair where the witness would sit. I had never been in that witness seat myself, but I had seen many other people there. I never until that day really appreciated the feeling of being a deponent. That seat is much different from every other seat in the room.
I was confident, of course, because the facts were on my side, but that doesn’t stop good lawyers from tripping up truthful witnesses. It happens all the time. Still, when I sat down, I thought it was simply going to be a deposition by Bob Critton. Critton was someone whom I knew well by this time through my cases representing Epstein’s victims, and I couldn’t understand why he’d agreed to represent Jeffrey against me. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would sell his soul for money.
But there we were. He was stacking up boxes of documents behind him when his associate Michael Pike came in and sat at the other end of the table. Darren Indyke, Epstein’s virtual in-house counsel, also sat at the table. Jack Goldberger then walked into the room, another familiar face. Finally, Jeffrey Epstein and Alan Dershowitz filed in,
with Dershowitz sitting closest to Critton, who was closest to me.
While I had wanted to take Dershowitz’s deposition in the past, I had never been able to do so, which meant we’d never been in the same room until now. As he sat down and looked at me, I smiled and said, “Wow, for you to be here, I must be really important.” He didn’t laugh, he just stared straight-faced like a mad shar-pei. I said, “That’s too bad, you can’t even laugh at my jokes.” Again, he still didn’t crack a smile. Jeffrey did, though.
The deposition started with Critton straining to imply through his questions that I was in the know during my five-month employment at RRA. He had nothing, though, so he got nowhere. At one point, he tried to insinuate that because Rothstein wore nice suits and owned various properties, which I did not know about, I should have known that he was running a Ponzi scheme. Every point he was trying to make was unconnected and problematic for him.
The last quantum leap was a truly laughable stretch. It really didn’t take more than five minutes before I settled in and realized that it didn’t matter what quality of lawyer was taking the deposition, or that Dershowitz was madly passing notes to Critton, covertly asking most of the questions. Epstein’s lawsuit against me was a contrived pile of trash. Jeffrey stacked half a dozen lawyers up to conceal the falsity of the allegations.
Reading that first deposition, I realized that I had been highly confident because the facts had been so fresh in my mind. Every detail that could possibly be relevant was new or recent back then. After that first one, quite a bit of time had passed before Epstein’s lawyers had taken my next depositions, which were on May 15, 2013, and again on October 10, 2013.
Reading the second deposition, in May of that year, I was reminded that it had been nerve-racking for a different reason. It was taken by Fred Haddad, who was a legend in our local courtrooms. He looked unassuming but was for years involved in nearly every high-profile case in town. He was the guy who would walk into hearings wearing jeans, an old jacket, and shoes with no socks. He was constantly making jokes and pretending not to know what was going on while really having mastered every fact in every case. His shtick was a scary one because he could ease the opposition into thinking he was a friend only to chop their heads off with the next question.
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