Anybody who has read about Jeffrey Epstein in the past dozen years would come away with the same impression Mr. Epstein apparently had about himself. The guy will soon be back in jail.
In his luxurious Manhattan townhouse, he reportedly commissioned a mural of himself at the center of a prison yard. According to the New York Times, he told a recent visitor, “That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’’
Mr. Epstein is back in a holding cell, under indictment by a U.S. attorney in New York. He will have his day in court. Presumably we will find out whether the evidence against the hedge-fund impresario for sexually abusing numerous underage girls in the early 2000s is as strong as it seems.
But one element of the story should give us pause, and that’s the seemingly concerted effort by the press to make a secondary villain out of the only prosecutor who succeeded in holding Mr. Epstein accountable till now because, 12 years later, that prosecutor is Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
A much-cited story in the Miami Herald last November is headlined “How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.” The paper thereby invokes a previously unknown form of retroactive quantum action at a distance, since Alexander Acosta’s actions as a U.S. attorney in Florida in 2007 could not have been premised on Mr. Trump being president a decade later.
The headline is also misleading. In fact, the Herald’s 5,000-word exposé tells us very little about the reasons and circumstances behind the 2008 plea deal in which Mr. Epstein agreed to plead guilty to two felonies, serve an 18-month jail sentence, pay restitution to certain victims, and accept designation for life as a registered sex offender.
Instead, the paper tells us what its own sources are willing to say now about Mr. Epstein more than a decade after the prosecution. What a newspaper can report in 2018 and what a prosecutor can prove in 2007 are two very different things. A fact the Herald also should have made plain: It was precisely Mr. Epstein’s conviction at the hands of Mr. Acosta that helped fuel the filing of civil lawsuits and emergence of newly declared victims that became the basis for the Herald’s own reporting.
Making an even bigger joke of the paper’s positioning of Mr. Acosta as Mr. Epstein’s protector is this glaring fact: It wasn’t Mr. Acosta but New York County’s district attorney—a member of the city’s ruling Democratic elite, with the illustrious name of Cyrus Vance Jr.—who in 2011 sought to undo Mr. Acosta’s work by relieving Mr. Epstein of his Level 3 sex offender status in New York state.
But then Mr. Vance is not a member of the Trump administration.
Maybe none of the prosecutors involved in this matter belong in the pantheon, but Mr. Acosta convicted Mr. Epstein and ended his depredations. Ninety-seven percent of federal prosecutions end in plea deals. The Herald tells us almost nothing about why this one did as well, except to note in passing that Mr. Vance later argued before a New York judge that Mr. Epstein’s “underage victims failed to cooperate in the [Florida] case.”
In fact, our best information right now comes from a three-page letter Mr. Acosta himself wrote to the Daily Beast in 2011. He described how his office was recruited into an already-existing prosecution by Palm Beach police who feared their state prosecutor intended to let Mr. Epstein off with probation. Mr. Acosta’s role was hindered by the need to find a federal crime to charge.
He also had to show deference to Florida. Mr. Epstein’s well-connected legal team—including Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr—kept appealing over his head to Washington. It sought dirt on Mr. Acosta’s staff in hopes of disqualifying key underlings from the case. He fretted about a drawn-out prosecution in which Mr. Epstein would walk free. He had no role in Florida’s subsequent decision to let Mr. Epstein out of jail six days a week to continue his business. Mr. Acosta also says that with the witnesses who subsequently have come forward, he could have made a stronger case.
The outcome may not have been deeply satisfying, but Mr. Acosta persevered to a conviction despite Mr. Epstein’s deep pockets and his constantly invoked list of powerful “friends,” including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump (though it was Mr. Trump who, in typically Trumpian fashion, raised an eyebrow as early as 2002 with a comment to New York magazine about the apparent youth of Mr. Epstein’s girlfriends).
It also bears asking: Would the Herald even have invested in reporting the Epstein story if it couldn’t also have flounced up an anti-Trump angle?
Yes, it’s been rough couple of decades for the newspaper business. At the kindest, the Herald should have had the confidence to rest its claim to public attention on what it had to reveal about Mr. Epstein’s behavior rather than trying so pathetically to annex its reporting to an au courant anti-Trump narrative.
I’ll defer to the judge on the existence of the law.
