Palm Beach, Florida is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound is on one end, and less than two miles up the beach, in a private cul-de-sac, sits the mansion that Epstein purchased in 1990. There, he developed a system of recruiting and grooming vulnerable underage girls from nearby working-class neighborhoods to be sexually exploited.
The billionaire would pay these girls a few hundred dollars for sexual favors, and for recruiting other vulnerable girls. He showed them photos of himself with presidents, billionaires, and royal families as a way of intimidating them into silence.
In November 2004, a mother reported that Epstein had paid her 14-year-old stepdaughter to strip and massage him. The police opened an investigation, and over the following year, they identified 36 underage girls with similar accounts.
Through his connections, Epstein learned of the investigation before police searched his mansion, giving him time to remove security tapes and other evidence. He then did what any billionaire caught running a child trafficking ring would do. He assembled an all-star legal team: Roy Black, Miami’s most celebrated defense attorney; Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law professor; Ken Starr, former US Solicitor General; and Jay Lefkowitz, former deputy assistant to George W. Bush.
His team got to work discrediting and intimidating the victims. They dug up social media posts and highlighted the petty crimes of some of the children. They relied on the fact that most of the girls were from working-class families and were afraid to testify against the well-connected billionaire financier. Far from defending these girls from the pressure, FBI agents and police referred to the victims as prostitutes and insinuated they had also committed crimes by “allowing” their own abuse.
Alexander Acosta was the prosecutor overseeing the case. He went on to serve as Trump’s Secretary of Labor. During the vetting process for that position, he allegedly told interviewers that he was instructed to cut Epstein some slack because Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and that the matter was “above his pay grade.”
Acosta obliged and Epstein got a sweetheart deal. He pled guilty to two state-level prostitution charges for which he was sentenced 18 months in prison. In return, the state shut down the ongoing FBI investigation into co-conspirators, despite the fact that many of the victims hadn’t even been interviewed yet. The victims were kept in the dark about the plea agreement, out of a fear they’d oppose the lenient terms.
The nearest state prison to Palm Beach at the time was the Glades Correctional Institution. There have been multiple class-action lawsuits alleging beatings, rapes, and murders of inmates while guards either looked the other way or participated directly. The broader Florida state prison system is no better. Three-quarters of Florida prison cells have no air conditioning, and hundreds of inmates die each year from preventable causes or violence.
Was Epstein subjected to any of this? No. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office—to whom, it so happens, he had donated $90,000 just months earlier—agreed to house him at their low-security county stockade. He didn’t even have to rub shoulders with the rest of the inmates. He paid $128,000 to staff an unused wing of the prison where his cell door was left unlocked and he enjoyed 24/7 access to a TV and phone.
After three and a half months of this “punishment,” he was allowed to go on work release for 16 hours a day, six days a week to “work” at the Florida Science Foundation, a legal entity he set up entirely for this purpose. In the year of house arrest that followed his sentence, he was permitted to fly between his residences in New York City and his private island in the Caribbean. He was allowed to go on long shopping trips and walk on the beach for “exercise.”
After his release, Epstein was welcomed back into elite circles. Nathan Wolfe, professor at Stanford, urged Epstein “never to let the bastards get you down.” Billionaire Les Wexner offered sympathy: “All I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number one rule … always be careful.”
Since Epstein was released in 2009, Americans’ trust in the judicial system has fallen from 62% to 35%, while 86% of Americans say that the Epstein files “show that powerful people in the US are rarely held accountable.” Despite their efforts to conceal their real nature, more and more workers are seeing the Epstein class for what they are—sadistic parasites who must be overthrown.