Reckoning for Jeffrey Epstein at last?

The case of Jeffrey Epstein is notorious because the serious charges against him of sex trafficking of underage girls was settled in a sweetheart plea deal kept secret from his accusers and that also placed many documents under seal. The US Attorney who arranged the deal Alexander Acosta is now Trump’s labor secretary. Many famous people were entertained by the wealthy Epstein. A motion by his victims to unseal the documents was approved by a judge last week. (You can see my past posts on the Epstein case here.)
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Jeffrey Epstein case takes a surprising turn

Today was the day when the civil trial brought by the lawyer of some of the accusers against sleazy convicted sex offender multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein was to go to trial. Last week, the Miami Herald released a bombshell investigation into the allegations and cover up of the abuse of young girls by Epstein who had plenty of friends in high places. But at the last minute a settlement was announced that included an apology by Epstein to Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who brought the case.
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The Jeffrey Epstein case is a perfect example of how plea deals favor the rich

I have written before about how plea bargains are used against poor people to get them, even if innocent of the crime were originally arrested for, to plead guilty to some other charge and accept a lower penalty, even if it includes jail time. Poor people do not have the resources to mount a vigorous defense and do not have access to the top prosecutors who make the decisions about who to prosecute and how vigorously. With rich people, it is the other way around, as I have described before with the way that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. treated leniently the wealthy and influential and well-connected and those who contributed to his campaigns (like Harvey Weinstein and members of the Trump family) but went after the poor and Chinese immigrants.
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The MIT-Epstein scandal gets even worse

The scandal over the effort by MIT to keep secret that they were getting money from Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction and being branded a sexual predator keeps getting worse. It has already seen the resignation of Joi Ito who was the head of the much-acclaimed Media Lab and now an internal investigation reveals that the president of MIT also knew of the donations and the scheme to keep it on the down-low.

The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is admitting that not only did the school hide donations from Jeffrey Epstein—he wrote the accused sex trafficker a thank-you letter.

“It is now clear that senior members of the administration were aware of gifts the Media Lab received between 2013 and 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein’s foundations,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

“Because the members of my team involved believed it was important that Epstein not use gifts to MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation, they asked [MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito] to agree to make clear to Epstein that he could not put his name on them publicly.”

Reif said he also was present at a meeting of his senior team where attendees discussed Epstein’s crimes and donations.

The Epstein and Sackler cases had better put college administrators everywhere on notice that they had damn well better make sure that their donors have clean hands. Of course, since many of these wealthy mega-donors do not have clean hands, the money they get will go down. But the rot of nefarious actors whitewashing their actions by giving ‘charitable’ donations has to stop.

What next for the Epstein investigation?

The death of Jeffrey Epstein in jail has caused a great deal of anger among his many victims who were hoping that his trial would serve to bring justice. They now fear that the whole investigation may shut down. If it does, there will be huge sighs of relief among all Epstein’s friends and associates. But the prosecutors in the case say that the investigations will continue. The vast scale of the sex trafficking of minors means that there had to have been other people involved. One of the charges against Epstein was a conspiracy charge and that means that other people’s roles were also being investigated.
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The Epstein saga continues to unfold

UPDATE: Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead in his jail cell.

The court documents about the lawsuits brought against Jeffrey Epstein that a judge ordered to be unsealed have been released and they contain explosive new allegations of a vast operation to get underage girls to perform sex act on Epstein and his friends and associates. The Daily Beast has gone through the 2,000 pages of unsealed documents and provided some of the most sensational findings.
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Epstein denied bail

In a ruling that should not have been a surprise convicted sex offender, and all-round creep Jeffrey Epstein’s request for bail was denied because the judge thought he not only posed a credible flight risk but also posed a threat to the community. This is a man who should not be allowed anywhere near young girls and women.

“The government has established danger to others and to the community by clear and convincing evidence,” the Manhattan federal court Judge Richard Berman said on Thursday. “I doubt that any bail package can overcome a danger to the community.”

But prosecutors portrayed Epstein as posing a risk. Authorities found possibly thousands of photographs in Epstein’s home showing young women, and “at least one individual in those photos … has self-identified as a victim of the defendant,” prosecutor Alex Rossmiller told Berman during Monday’s bail arguments.

“Just this morning, the government became aware that in a locked safe in the defendant’s mansion there were piles of cash, dozens of diamonds, and a passport appearing to be issued from a foreign country with a photo of the defendant and a name on that passport that is not the defendant’s name,” Rossmiller also said.

If an extremely wealthy person facing a possible lifetime in prison with multiple lavish homes in several countries and private jets and even his own damn island is not a flight risk, then the term would have ceased to have any meaning.

So now he will have plenty of time to reflect on the utter misery he has caused to so many women.

Explosive theories emerge about Epstein’s money and friends

Readers of this blog may be concerned that it has become all Jeffrey Epstein, all the time. The reason for my spending so much time on it is that the money aspects of this story might blow the lid off the seedy underbelly of the wealthy class in the US who have got so used to thinking of themselves as immune to any consequences of their actions, however awful. Anything that strips the veneer off them and shows them as they really are is something I am going to help move along in any way I can.

Let’s review what we know about the facts of the case. Epstein lived the life of a very wealthy person but it is murky as to exactly how wealthy he is and good reason to suspect that he was exaggerating it. Although he claims to be a hedge fund manager, it is not known how he earned his money and he has only one named client. Celebrities were constantly in his presence and attending his parties and otherwise socializing with him. Epstein is clearly a pervert who preys on young, underage, girls and seems to have them around all the time. And yet, these same celebrities claim to have not been aware of his perversions, with some even claiming not to have noticed any young girls around, despite their constant presence. And even after he was convicted in a sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and the scandal blew wide open recently, many of these celebrity friends not only did not condemn him, they only mildly distanced themselves from him, with some even claiming that they did not believe the charges against him.
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The Epstein dominoes start to fall

The first casualty of the new Jeffrey Epstein prosecution came about when labor secretary Alexander Acosta resigned this morning. The resignation followed the usual pattern in the Donald Trump administration, first of defiance and great expressions of support from Trump, to a resignation a couple of days later. Apparently Trump told Acosta on Tuesday to hold a press conference on Wednesday and get ahead of this story. Acosta duly obliged and gave a conference where he stated that rather than giving Epstein an unbelievably generous sweetheart deal in his earlier prosecution in 2008, he had actually got the severest sentence he thought possible. Trump then expressed his great confidence in Acosta. But that did not end the controversy and this morning, with Acosta at his side, Trump announced his resignation.
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New disgusting Epstein stories emerge

Writer Jesse Kornbluth at one time moved around in the same social circles as Jeffrey Epstein and he describes his personal experiences with Epstein and his entourage and the rich people who enabled his behavior.

My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all.

The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”

That was how, in June of 1987, Jeffrey Epstein became dead to me.
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