A federal appeals court is moving toward unsealing documents in a civil suit related to billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein just as the sweetheart plea deal Epstein received in 2008 courtesy of now-Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta is under investigation by the Department of Justice. How’s that for a big mouthful of sleaze and corruption?
The lawsuit in question was brought in 2015 by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says she was recruited as a “masseuse” for Epstein while she was working at Mar-a-Lago (really!) at age 16, against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s one-time girlfriend, who Giuffre says recruited her. The massages were a pretext for sexual abuse. Maxwell settled the suit out of court in 2017, but the records could be unsealed thanks to a motion from the Miami Herald (which has been all over the Epstein story) and dozens of other media companies.
That could in turn make public more information about just what kind of evidence Acosta was looking at when he decided not to prosecute Epstein on federal charges and instead allow him to plead guilty to lesser state charges. Epstein, who has been accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, spent 13 months in a private section of the county jail while benefiting from a cushy work release that had him at his rich-guy office 12 hours a day. A federal judge has ruled that Acosta and other federal prosecutors broke a victims’ rights law by not telling Epstein’s victims about the deal before it was finalized. That matter is being reviewed by a U.S. attorney in Atlanta.