EDITORIAL: Epstein's victims are overdue for justice

Dec. 16--The Jeffrey Epstein case is back in the news, with attention focused on Alexander Acosta, the then-U.S. Attorney in Miami who gave the accused serial sex offender the plea deal of a lifetime -- and who now is U.S. Labor Secretary in the cabinet of Donald Trump. It's an all-too-perfect twist in a story of justice bending over to service a multimillionaire with powerful celebrity friends and a history of sexual misadventure.

The facts of this tawdry saga were covered exhaustively more than a decade ago by Jane Musgrave and other reporters at the Palm Beach Post and our sister paper, The Palm Beach Daily News. But now the teenage girls whom Epstein enticed to his Palm Beach mansion -- or to his private plane nicknamed "Lolita Express" or his private isle in the U.S. Virgin Islands -- are grown women.

The Miami Herald, to its credit, identified 80 of them and found, in this era of #MeToo, that some had plenty to say: that they were abused by Epstein and then abused again by a justice system which ignored them as it buckled to Epstein and his all-star collection of lawyers, luminaries on the order of Alan Dershowitz, Roy Black and Kenneth Starr.

In the plea deal signed by Acosta in 2007, the government quietly tossed a 53-page federal indictment that could have put Epstein behind bars for life. Instead, Epstein pled guilty to two state felony prostitution charges and served just 13 months in Palm Beach County Jail -- if you can call it that. He was housed in a private wing of the jail and allowed to leave the premises 16 hours each day, free to hang out in an office he opened on Australian Boulevard.

Neither Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who consented to the special jailhouse treatment, nor then State Attorney Barry Krischer, whose hot-potato handling of the Town of Palm Beach Police's evidence was the first failure to properly prosecute, have adequately explained why they were so solicitous of the rich guy with the repellent habits.

Attorney Jack Scarola is attempting to un-do the plea agreement with a lawsuit claiming that it violated the Crime Victim Rights Act by not telling Epstein's victims about the pact before it was signed. Although simple justice is on their side, the circumstances aren't so simple. The government contends that the plea deal was the best outcome because the women were too young to be solid witnesses against Epstein at the time -- and almost none had the courage to come forward. In general, the girls came from abusive and impoverished homes and, in some cases, returned to Epstein's home dozens of times to collect his $200. The girls' own sexual histories would have been raked over by Epstein's lawyers. Thirty of them were eligible to sue Epstein for huge rewards. All that would have shattered their credibility with a jury.

Thus, although three eventually settled lawsuits against Epstein for a total $5.5 million, they were abandoned by the criminal justice system. Their lack of status made them prey for Epstein and his money; that same low status made them worthless as witnesses in the eyes of prosecutors.

Hopefully, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra, presiding over Scarola's lawsuit, will take a different attitude now that society has woken to the plight of women who are abused by the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves and Bill Cosby.

As for Acosta, Lois Frankel, D-Palm Beach, and 11 other members of Congress are right to demand that the Justice Department investigate all aspects of the plea deal to see what strings were pulled to produce such an outrageous outcome.

But we have to ask, where have Frankel and the others been all these years? The plea deal didn't just now begin to stink; the stench has lingered for a dozen years. If this is mainly an exercise in embarrassing President Trump by exposing a sketchy cabinet member, it's short-sighted. Critics will rightly wonder if the politicians held their fire because Epstein, a friend of Bill Clinton's, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates.

The offenses here mock the ideals of our justice system -- we are supposed to have "equal justice under the laws," not one kind of justice for the rich and another for everyone else.

And it past time that we listen to the women who were the pawns in Epstein's sexual pleasuring. They have been the nameless figures in this story. Now we know their names. We're getting to know their stories. They deserve, finally, justice.

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