Epstein docs reveal high-level complicity
Nearly 1,000 pages of court documents from a 2015 defamation case against now-deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein were unsealed on Wednesday, revealing new details about his operation, including the extent of the US government’s apparent awareness of his salacious activities.
Harvard law professor and vocal advocate for the abolition of age-of-consent laws Alan Dershowitz was shown to be deeply involved in negotiating the notorious 2007 non-prosecution agreement that shielded Epstein from the consequences of abusing dozens if not hundreds of underage girls. Epstein dodged federal sex-trafficking charges in exchange for pleading guilty to a low-level state offense and serving just 13 months in part-time custody.
Dershowitz visited Epstein’s Florida mansion “pretty often” and received massages while he was there, according to sworn testimony from Epstein employee Juan Alessi. Given that nearly every witness interviewed explained that “massage” meant “sex,” attorney Bradley Edwards argued in a 2014 filing that Dershowitz’s involvement in drafting the non-prosecution agreement “provided protection for himself against criminal prosecution in Florida for sexually abusing [Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre]” in violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act, because the agreement “provided immunity from federal prosecution in the Southern District of Florida not only to Epstein, but also to ‘any potential co-conspirators of Epstein’.”
The documents also raise questions about some of the named individuals’ ongoing insistence that they were unaware of Epstein’s voracious appetite for what his ‘madam’, convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, referred to as “the nubiles.”
Epstein “masseuse” Johanna Sjoberg claimed during a deposition that when magician David Copperfield had performed for Epstein and his guests at the predator’s home, he had specifically “questioned [her] if [she] was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls.”
While former US President Bill Clinton’s friendship with Epstein – which included dozens of trips on his private jet, the Lolita Express – has long been public knowledge, Sjoberg’s deposition noted that Epstein had personally told her the ex-president “likes them young, referring to girls.”
Sjoberg also said she met Britain's Prince Andrew when the royal visited Epstein’s Manhattan home, in which Maxwell brought out a “Prince Andrew puppet,” said to be from “a production from a show on BBC,” and posed it on Giuffre’s lap with its hand on her breast while the ‘real’ prince sat on – and similarly groped – Sjoberg. The photo was not included in the document dump, however, and Sjoberg claimed she never saw it after it was taken.
Billionaire financier Glenn Dubin and his former private chef Rinaldo Rizzo, former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and hotel magnate Tom Pritzker are among the hundreds of men named in the unsealed documents as having been involved in Epstein’s sprawling sex trafficking-blackmail operation.
