by Craig Unger
Initially, he says, he put all the Epstein videos into a TrueCrypt container, which moved from server to server over the years as insurance that the data would stay fresh and safe from data loss. When TrueCrypt discontinued its software in 2014, Dougan switched to VeraCrypt and rotated encrypted backups on a regular basis.31
Later, he says, he distributed the data to unidentified contacts who did not know each other and who lived on five different continents and are unable to read the files because they do not have the decryption keys. “I do not have a physical copy in my immediate possession, because of security reasons,” he told me. “This is to make sure my family and friends remain safe. I have made arrangements that it can only be decrypted in the event of my arrest, if I go missing for an extended time, or in case of my unusual or untimely demise. I have a system in place to connect people with the encrypted containers to those who have the decryption keys.”32
According to the Daily Mail, “Dougan, who said he has received death threats since fleeing the United States, added that he had no intention of ever revealing the contents stored on encrypted drives. ‘I am not going to reveal them and I am not going to blackmail anyone. If I give them up then I lose all my leverage and I do not want that to happen.’”33
In other words, the kompromat was perfectly safe. Unless, of course, the FBI, the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, Ghislaine Maxwell, or some other unidentified parties could break the codes.
And, of course, there was the question of whether Dougan had made a deal with the FSB. For all the indications that he may be a con man or an eccentric, in Britain, MI6 was taking Dougan very seriously indeed as someone who may be working directly with Russian intelligence. The chief reason, the Daily Mail reported in September 2019, had to do with his meeting with Pavel Borodin.
The paper cited a Western intelligence source saying that Dougan had all the classic traits that made him vulnerable to recruitment by “a hostile intelligence service.” It also noted that “his knowledge of the Epstein case would have been of great interest to Russian intelligence.”34
But the fate of the kompromat remained uncertain.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE LAWYERS
John Mark Dougan wasn’t the only one who had access to Epstein’s kompromat. There were lawyers on both sides of the case—the prosecution team and those defending Epstein would have had access as well. And as the Epstein investigation in Palm Beach metastasized into a probe of a major pedophilia and human trafficking operation, Epstein and his attorneys launched a no-holds-barred campaign in the interests of damage control and tamping down the investigation.
Even before the Palm Beach investigation began, Epstein had tried to ingratiate himself with the local police by donating $50,000 to the Palm Beach Police Scholarship Fund, offering tuition help to the children of law enforcement officers, and $90,000 to the Palm Beach Police Department in 2004—all while ramping up his sex trafficking operation right under their noses.1
Epstein’s generosity to the police recalls Trump’s magnanimity with the FBI’s James Kallstrom—although it was not as successful. By fall 2005, with the Epstein probe fully under way, Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter and detective Joe Recarey felt that something fishy was going on to impede their investigation. One sign came on October 20, 2005, after police had clearly established probable cause and executed a search warrant at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, only to find that computers and other electronic equipment that had vital evidence had been removed. That suggested Epstein had been tipped off.2
According to Perversion of Justice, the award-winning series in the Miami Herald by Julie K. Brown and Emily Michot, just as the investigation began to snowball, word got back to Epstein that the police had been questioning some of the girls. In response, Epstein hired Alan Dershowitz,3 the Harvard Law School professor and, by Dershowitz’s account, a close friend.
Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that she was recruited by Epstein when she was sixteen, also charged that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz on six occasions, and she sued him, alleging that “Defendant Dershowitz was Epstein’s attorney, close friend, and co-conspirator. Dershowitz was also a participant in sex trafficking, including as one of the men to whom Epstein lent out Plaintiff for sex.” She also accused him of making “false and malicious defamatory statements” against her.4
Dershowitz has denied the charges and countersued Giuffre, claiming that Giuffre “conspired with her lawyers to publish her false and defamatory claims of and concerning Dershowitz with a knowing or reckless disregard of their falsity,” according to his lawsuit. “She has done so with the specific intent and design that her statements be a source for the media so that the media will publish her false allegations of and concerning Dershowitz that he had sex with her while she was underage as part of Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking of minors.”
Like Epstein, Dershowitz was a middle-class Brooklyn Jew who had ascended to the national stage, albeit in a very different way. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Borough Park, Brooklyn, he initially built a reputation as a prominent civil libertarian and had become, at twenty-eight, the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard Law School.
But what was most notable about Dershowitz was his overweaning desire to deliver polemics on behalf of the most offensive, controversial, and, often, richest clients on the planet. When it came to defending free speech, Dershowitz’s clients were neo-Nazis and pornographers. Similarly, when it came to violence against women, he assembled a client list that reads like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for misogynistic criminals. There was Claus von Bulow, the Danish-German-British socialite who was convicted and later acquitted of attempting to murder his wife and leaving her comatose. There was O. J. Simpson, the football great who was acquitted of murdering his wife and her friend, but was found responsible for their deaths in a civil trial. There was heavyweight boxing champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, film producer/sex criminal Harvey Weinstein, and, finally, Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, who, according to Business Insider, has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment by at least twenty-six women.5
And now there was Dershowitz’s newest client, Jeffrey Epstein, whom he regarded so highly that, as Connie Bruck reported in the New Yorker, Epstein was the only non-family member Dershowitz trusted to read rough drafts of his books.6
Dershowitz wasn’t a member of the Florida bar, but he agreed to take on the case and helped assemble a high-powered legal team for Epstein consisting of big-name attorneys who covered all the bases politically. He started off by giving Epstein a list of lawyers he “worked with in the past that had been exceptionally able and Jeffrey picked from the list,” Dershowitz told the Daily Beast.*
One of the first people Epstein chose was Ken Starr, then a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, and the former solicitor general in the administration of George H. W. Bush. “Starr had experience in investigating sex investigations,” Dershowitz said.7 “He had experience as the solicitor general and as a judge. He had all the bases covered.”
Epstein also brought on Roy Black, Miami’s most famous criminal defense lawyer, who won renown in 1991 when he got an acquittal for William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Ted Kennedy who had been charged with rape. He has also defended actor Kelsey Grammer, sportscaster Marv Albert, and bombastic right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Finally, Epstein also brought on Jay Lefkowitz, another partner at Kirkland & Ellis; former US attorney Guy Lewis; and criminal defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt.
Meanwhile, Dershowitz flew to Florida and met privately with the state attorney of Palm Beach County, Barry Krischer, who at the time was said to be intent on prosecuting Epstein aggressively. According to the Miami Herald, Epstein immediately struck back and that’s when, Palm Beach detective Joe Recarey said, “the shenanigans” began. Police reports show that Epstein’s investigators began to impers
onate cops to conduct interviews, picked through Michael Reiter’s trash in search of incriminating material, and followed the girls and their families.8
Initially, according to Reiter, Barry Krischer had been saying, “We’ll put this guy away for life.” But before long, Epstein’s high-powered legal team went to work, and Krischer eased off.9 Epstein’s teenage victims were really high school girls who were being assaulted by a man who was forty years older, but Krischer suddenly started to act as if they were seasoned prostitutes looking for clients.10
After Reiter realized that Krischer was going to indict Epstein only on the relatively minor charge of soliciting prostitutes, rather than on far more serious charges of sex trafficking and pedophilia, he was so fed up that he released a letter calling on Krischer to remove himself, and he called in the FBI. Bringing in the feds meant that Alexander Acosta, then US attorney for the Southern District of Florida and a Republican, would now prosecute the case.
Acosta had also been a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, and the fact that Epstein defense attorneys Ken Starr and Jay Lefkowitz were from the same firm was not incidental. It was smart politics to have defense attorneys who were close to the prosecutors, and that kind of thing happened a lot with Kirkland.
In addition, Ken Starr’s presence on Epstein’s team carried with it enormous political clout. Having served as solicitor general, a prestigious post that made him the government’s top lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court, Starr had also won nationwide notoriety as the independent counsel who spent four years, from 1994 to 1998, building a case against Bill Clinton that ultimately led to his impeachment.
Given Starr’s past involvement in cases involving sex, there was a certain unspoken irony in having such a prim, devoutly religious man defending a pedophile who was one of the great sex criminals in American history. In prosecuting Clinton with his deputy Brett Kavanaugh, Starr refashioned a probe about an Arkansas real estate deal that went south into one about consensual oral sex between Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.* The so-called Starr Report he oversaw marked a momentous point in the history of salacious government documents, with its explicit accounts of oral sex, a cigar in a vagina, and Monica’s famous semen-stained blue dress.
Insistently professing his religious adherence to family values, Starr emerged as something of a prissy, schoolmarmish scold, albeit one with real political clout in Washington. Later, in 2016, Starr was fired from his post as president of Baylor University for ignoring at least seventeen women on campus who reported sexual or domestic assault involving nineteen football players.11 And now he was in the corner of one of the most notorious and decadent sex-trafficking pedophiles in US history, who just happened to have a mother lode of secrets.
From the moment of his arrival at Kirkland & Ellis, Starr was one of its big guns. For many years Kirkland had been a relatively nonpolitical Chicago-based firm whose Washington, DC, office was regarded as little more than an unexceptional outpost. But that changed dramatically when Starr came to Kirkland in 1993. His stint as solicitor general meant that Starr was a serious catch for any number of top firms. His presence changed Kirkland’s brand identity from that of a middle-of-the-road establishment firm into one that had a powerhouse Washington office newly filled with ambitious young conservatives who had clerked for Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy. It has since become the biggest law firm in the world by revenue, with more than $4 billion in billings in 2019.12
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In the Epstein case, Kirkland’s lawyers were everywhere, on both the prosecution and the defense, and for the defense, Kirkland’s Jay Lefkowitz made mincemeat of a fifty-three-page indictment the feds had put together that accused Epstein of being a serial child molester and sex trafficker—and should have made Epstein spend the rest of his life in jail.
Instead, in October 2007, Lefkowitz had breakfast with former Kirkland partner Alexander Acosta, who would be his adversary in prosecuting the case.13 At Kirkland & Ellis, Acosta had specialized in employment and labor issues, and Lefkowitz, a domestic policy adviser and special envoy to North Korea during the administration of George W. Bush, had specialized in litigation. More to the point, according to the website Above the Law, the two men had been good friends at Kirkland, which made Lefkowitz the perfect choice to lean on Acosta.14
On the face of it, Acosta had an extraordinarily powerful case against Epstein. It was based on depositions of dozens of girls telling essentially the same story about how they were groomed and recruited to be “sex slaves” to Epstein when some of them were as young as thirteen or fourteen years old.
“This is not a ‘he said, she said’ situation,” Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter told the Miami Herald.15 After all, more than fifty girls all told essentially the same story.
But even with such a strong hand, Acosta essentially caved and gave Lefkowitz an astounding amount of latitude to write up a “non-prosecution agreement” for Epstein. Under its terms, Epstein would plead guilty to two prostitution counts and serve his sentence in the county jail.
Moreover, as part of the agreement, Epstein was allowed to leave jail for twelve hours a day, six days a week. In 2009, the deal was actually modified and made even more lenient, allowing Epstein to leave jail up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, including two hours a day at his Palm Beach mansion, where much of the abuse had taken place.16 Epstein’s regular visitors included Sarah Kellen and Nadia Marcinkova, who was widely said to have participated in sexual encounters as his “sex slave” with him and the underage girls she had recruited.
Whatever was going on, this was not hard time. Acosta had given new meaning to the term “sweetheart deal.”
Even more astounding, the non-prosecution agreement granted immunity to Kellen and Marcinkova, who had been named as potential co-conspirators, and other co-conspirators both named and unnamed. That essentially killed the ongoing FBI investigation into other young women and girls who had been Epstein’s victims. Clearly, Epstein’s operation involved international sex trafficking on a huge scale, but Acosta had agreed to give it a pass. No investigation into pedophilia, sex slavery, or human trafficking. No investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell. And the same for Jean-Luc Brunel, and all the young women who had facilitated Epstein’s operation. Dozens of other people were involved, but now they were all off the hook.
Bradley Edwards, an attorney representing two of Epstein’s victims, described the deal as a “conspiracy between the government and Epstein” that was intended “to make the whole thing go away as quietly as possible. In never consulting with the victims, and keeping it secret, it showed that someone with money can buy his way out of anything.”17
Finally, in apparent violation of a federal law, Acosta agreed that the terms of the non-prosecution deal itself should be sealed when it was approved by the judge, thereby preventing any chance for the victims to show up in court and object. No one would know—not even the victims who’d had the courage to come forward.
And in fact, it remained secret until it was first exposed by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown in November 2018.
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So why did Alexander Acosta cave so easily? At a press conference on July 10, 2019, he said simply, “We did what we did because Epstein needed to go to jail.”18
But journalist Vicky Ward, who wrote about Epstein for Vanity Fair (which declined to print her allegations about Epstein’s relations with young girls), had a more intriguing explanation. According to Ward’s story in the Daily Beast, in 2016, when Acosta was being interviewed by the Trump transition team, he was asked about Epstein and “explained breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade.”19
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br /> According to Ward, Acosta told the Trump team that he “was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” The Trump team apparently thought that was good enough, so they took him on as secretary of labor.
Of course, the assertion that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” raised far more questions than it answered. Which intelligence service? It seemed unlikely that Epstein would have been working for the CIA or FBI, unless he had been an FBI cooperator back in the eighties when he was running scams with Steven Hoffenberg. Or did this have something to do with relationships that dated back to the days when Epstein supposedly was working with Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell? Did Epstein have ties to Russian intelligence, as Maxwell had? What about the Israelis and his ties to Ehud Barak? Or were Epstein and, presumably, Ghislaine just keeping the kompromat around for the right moment when it would come in handy, or selling it to the highest bidder?
Similarly, Epstein’s ties to intelligence became an issue in 2013 when he had a meeting with journalist Edward Jay Epstein, who asked him about his business and wrote about the episode in the Mail on Sunday, the British tabloid.
“I manage money for a few select clients,” Epstein said.20
Ed pointed to photos on the wall of Epstein with Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati prince Mohammed bin Zayed, and Jeffrey allowed that some of them were.
“What about Russia?” Ed asked. “Any clients there?”
With that, Epstein just shrugged and said he often went to Moscow to see Vladimir Putin.
But no one ever knew if Epstein was telling the truth.
Those issues aside, the Epstein plea deal was the product of high-powered lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis working for both the prosecution and the defense. For one thing, in order to get such a deal approved, Acosta would have had to run it up the flagpole with the Department of Justice in Washington. However, at the time, in October 2007, Alberto Gonzales had just resigned as attorney general and had not yet been replaced. According to the New York Daily News, another Justice Department official who signed off on Epstein’s non-prosecution deal was Mark Filip, who was then a senior official at the Justice Department and had shuttled back and forth between the DOJ and Kirkland & Ellis, where, at this writing, he is a partner.21
