The convicted pedophile was being held without bail as he faced charges of child sex trafficking.

Updated 08.10.19 11:13AM ET / Published 08.10.19 9:14AM ET
Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, 66, has died inside a Manhattan correctional facility, two senior law enforcement officials told The Daily Beast. They said that it appeared he had committed suicide.

A spokeswoman for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner confirmed they had Epstein's body, and said, “We are investigating this death. Cause and manner are pending.” The Department of Justice has announced that the FBI is investigating the death.

"On Saturday, August 10, 2019, at approximately 6:30 a.m., inmate Jeffrey Edward Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell in the Special Housing Unit from an apparent suicide," the DOJ announced in a press release. "Life-saving measures were initiated immediately by responding staff. Staff requested emergency medical services (EMS) and life-saving efforts continued. Mr. Epstein was transported by EMS to a local hospital for treatment of life-threatening injuries, and subsequently pronounced dead by hospital staff."

The Fire Department of New York received a call at 6:39 a.m. to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and transported Epstein to New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, a spokesman confirmed.

Epstein was being held without bail at the MCC as he faced charges of child sex trafficking. The mysterious multimillionaire has been in the notorious federal lockup since his surprise arrest at New Jersey's Teterboro airport in early July, after he arrived on his private jet from Paris.

He had been placed on suicide watch several weeks ago after he was found in his cell "in medical distress" with "apparent bruising on his neck."

The financier's sudden death comes only a day after newly unsealed court documents show one of his accusers claimed that he and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked her to powerful men for sex. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who says Maxwell recruited her as a 16-year-old during her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, testified that Epstein and Maxwell lent her out for kinky sex with foreign heads of state, a wealthy Wall Streeter, a former U.S. senator, a highly-regarded scientist, and Britain's Prince Andrew.

None of the other men accused have been charged of a crime and all deny the allegations—as has Maxwell, a British socialite who was Epstein's girlfriend and served as his assistant.

Epstein had initially been held in general population at MCC, where he’d been targeted for extortion as a wealthy pedophile, a source with knowledge of his circumstances told The Daily Beast, describing Epstein’s injuries from his prior alleged suicide attempt as small abrasions around his neck.

Epstein's death leaves behind a host of baffling questions which now may never be answered. That includes how he built his fortune—he claimed to manage money for billionaires, and served on the board of family charities for titans Leon Black and Les Wexner, but experts are dubious of his story and say he instead appeared to have expertise in moving money offshore. Others have speculated that he was blackmailing wealthy clients after luring them to his legendarily lusty parties with beautiful young girls on his private Caribbean island and at his palatial Manhattan townhouse.

Also unanswered: What Epstein was doing with a safe full of cash, loose diamonds, and an Austrian passport under an assumed name (and with a Saudi address), which feds uncovered when they raided his New York mansion.

What is known is that Epstein moved in circles of astounding wealth and influence. He counted President Donald Trump as a friend—until the two fell out over real estate—and flew President Bill Clinton around on his private plane. He palled around with Prince Andrew, went into business with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and hosted salons and getaways for scientific geniuses.

But behind his glittering facade, Epstein peddled in darkness.

Scores of young women have come forward over more than a decade to accuse Epstein of sexual abuse, starting with dozens of underage girls in Florida. Two sisters have also claimed that Epstein and Maxwell raped one of them in Wexner's Ohio mansion, and molested the other while she was underage at the financier's remote Zorro Ranch in New Mexico.

But the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami decided not to pursue federal charges against the well-connected money man in 2007, allowing him instead to plead guilty to a pair of state prostitution charges. He served 18 months, most of it in the Palm Beach County jail on a lenient work release program.

That deal—which also gave broad immunity to any of Epstein's potential co-conspirators—is now under intense scrutiny, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis directing state law enforcement to take over a probe into how Epstein was allowed to leave his cell for 12 hours a day to visit his office and his home. At least one woman has claimed that Epstein abused her while on his work release.

Meanwhile, the feds will soon have to answer how Epstein managed to kill himself inside a secure lockup while he was already on suicide watch.

At the time of Epstein's first suicide attempt, he shared a cell with Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer charged with kidnapping and murdering four people in 2016. Tartaglione had been housed in the MCC's Special Housing Unit, alongside Epstein, because corrections officials had allegedly found a cellphone in Tartaglione's previous cell.

Tartaglione's lawyer, Bruce Barket, told authorities his client had saved Epstein’s life during the first suicide attempt by alerting corrections officers. He claimed Tartaglione was being implicated in the suicide attempt because he’d recently complained about conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, saying in a statement at the time, "we warned the judge that officials at the jail would retaliate against Nick because we have been exposing the inhumane conditions at the facility.”

A source added that while protocols were followed after his previous apparent suicide attempt, Epstein received no preferential treatment.

The rich man “lived like a pig in a sty” after that attempt, the source said, eating his meals off of the floor and constantly requesting more toilet paper. In conversations with other inmates, he at times asked for their inmate numbers, presumably to put money into their accounts.

With Epstein's death, victims and their advocates have again been denied their day in court. Julie Brown, whose reporting for the Miami Herald helped reignite the Epstein case, said on CNN Saturday morning that the focus will now turn on who else should be held accountable to bring justice to the young women whose childhoods were robbed by Epstein.

"The fact that Jeffrey Epstein was able to commit the selfish act of taking his own life as his world of abuse, exploitation, and corruption unraveled is both unfortunate and predictable," said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Epstein's victims who has pursued the financier for years.

"While he and I engaged in contentious legal battles for more than a decade, this is not the ending anyone was looking for. The victims deserved to see Epstein held accountable, and he owed it to everyone he hurt to accept responsibility for all of the pain he caused. We will continue to represent his victims and will not stop in their pursuit of finality and justice. It is never too late to come forward with information."

Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for Giuffre and other victims, and a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, said: "The fact that Epstein took his own life within 24 hours of the unsealing of detailed and devastating documents and exhibits in Virginia Giuffre's lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, which informed the public of the scope, scale and sophistication of the international sex trafficking operation Epstein conducted, is no coincidence."

"We are hopeful that the government will continue to investigate and will focus on those who participated and facilitated Epstein's horrifying sex trafficking scheme that damaged so many," she added.

Victim Jennifer Araoz, who says Epstein and his minions recruited her from a New York high school and raped her when she was just 15, expressed anger on hearing the news of Epstein's suicide. “We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people. Epstein is gone, but justice must still be served," she said.

"I hope the authorities will pursue and prosecute his accomplices and enablers, and ensure redress for his victims.”

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. The arrest comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.

For more than a decade, Epstein’s alleged abuse of minors has been the subject of lawsuits brought by victims, investigations by local and federal authorities, and exposés in the press. But despite the attention cast on his alleged sex crimes, the hedge-funder has managed to avoid any meaningful jail time, let alone federal charges.

The new charges allege that Epstein sexually exploited dozens of underage girls in a now-familiar scheme: paying them cash for "massages" and then molesting or sexually abusing them in his Upper East Side mansion or his palatial residence in Palm Beach. Several employees and associates allegedly recruited the girls for Epstein's abuse, and some victims eventually became recruiters themselves, according to law enforcment. The girls were as young as 14, and Epstein knew they were underage, according to police.

Epstein's attorney, Martin Weinberg, declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast on Saturday night.

In an era where #MeToo has toppled powerful men, Epstein’s name was largely absent from the national conversation, until the Miami Herald published a three-part series on how his wealth, power and influence shielded him from federal prosecution. For years, The Daily Beast reported on Epstein’s easy jail sentence and soft treatment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which ultimately scrapped a 53-page indictment against Epstein. An earlier version of Epstein’s plea deal included a 10-year federal sentence—before his star-studded lawyers threatened to go to trial in a case prosecutors feared was unwinnable, in part because Epstein’s team dredged up dirt on the victims, including social media posts indicating drug use.

Meanwhile, the financier has flitted among his homes in Palm Beach, New York City, and the Virgin Islands, as well as his secluded Zorro Ranch in Stanley, New Mexico, transporting young women on his private jet to facilitate the sexual abuse that’s gone unchecked by authorities, his alleged victims say.

Yet, as early as 2003, Vicky Ward’s Vanity Fair profile cracked into Epstein’s enigmatic facade and, as Ward noted, revealed “he was definitely not what he claimed to be.” Back then, allegations of sexual abuse leveled by one accuser, Maria Farmer, and her family were excised from Ward’s piece after Epstein pressured the magazine.

Epstein’s bust comes mere months after a federal judge ruled his 2007 non-prosecution agreement—secretly inked under former U.S. Attorney and current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta—violated federal law by keeping Epstein’s victims in the dark. Under the sweetheart deal, Epstein dodged federal charges that might have sent him to prison for life. He instead pleaded guilty to minor state charges in Palm Beach, and served 13 months in a private wing of a county jail, mostly on work release.

The alleged victims, who sued the government for violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, asked the court to rescind Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement and called for the feds to hold him criminally liable. The NPA also granted immunity to Epstein’s co-conspirators, identified in the document as “including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova.”

Epstein reportedly supplied valuable intel to federal investigators in exchange for his lenient plea deal; it’s been speculated this information may have been related to Bear Stearns executives’ alleged crimes in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Epstein’s Victims

During his high-flying finance years, Epstein also allegedly harbored a dark secret: his widespread abuse of underage girls. But in 2005, Palm Beach police launched an investigation into Epstein after a 14-year-old girl told police an older man named “Jeff” had molested her at his residence, a two-story pink mansion on a dead-end street.

Authorities would discover a disturbing teen sex ring, where victims were allegedly paid to recruit other young girls to provide “massages” inside Epstein’s lair. The victims would be led to Epstein’s bedroom, and Epstein would enter and order them to remove their clothing, police said. The financier would then assault them—sometimes forcing them into intercourse with him or a young woman he described as his “sex slave”—and pay them $200 to $1,000 per visit, according to court documents.

Police say Epstein’s massages were booked with the help of his personal assistants, including Sarah Kellen, who kept a rolodex of underage girls.

But as The Daily Beast previously reported, the state attorney’s office in Palm Beach declined to pursue serious charges against Epstein (filing only a single felony count of soliciting prostitution), claiming the girls weren’t credible. The local police chief, Michael Reiter, accused prosecutors of giving Epstein special treatment and in 2006 referred the case to the FBI. By May 2007, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami drafted a 53-page indictment against Epstein, alongside an 82-page prosecution memorandum. That summer, however, Epstein’s lawyers worked to unravel the case, claiming Epstein wasn’t guilty of any federal crimes.

“The local police chief, Michael Reiter, accused prosecutors of giving Epstein special treatment and in 2006 referred the case to the FBI.”

Epstein and the feds drew up a non-prosecution agreement in September 2007. Without informing any of the victims, the two sides decided that Epstein would plead guilty to a pair of state charges (solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution) and waive his right to contest damages, if the victims decided to sue him over the abuse. He also agreed to pay for the girls’ attorney’s fees.

Indeed, the NPA stated that “the United States, in consultation with and subject to the good faith approval of Epstein’s counsel, shall select an attorney representative for [the victims], who shall be paid for by Epstein.”

The NPA also granted immunity to any “potential co-conspirator” of Epstein’s and ensured the deal would “not be made part of any public record.”

Epstein could have faced multiple federal charges, the NPA noted, including: sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud or coercion, 18 U.S.C. 1591; the use of a facility or means of interstate commerce to entice minors into prostitution, 18 U.S.C. 2422(b); and traveling for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct with minors, 18 U.S.C. 2423(b). The document states Epstein might have committed those crimes from around 2001 to September 2007.

Other women claim that Epstein’s alleged abuse spanned many years and many locations, according to civil court filings.

“Epstein could have faced multiple federal charges, the NPA noted, including sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud or coercion.”

In an April 2019 affidavit, a woman named Maria Farmer said she met Epstein and Maxwell sometime in 1995, at one of Farmer’s art shows in New York. In 1996, Epstein offered her a job to help him acquire art. But according to Farmer, she instead ended up manning the door at Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion and keeping records of his visitors.

Some of those visitors, Farmer claimed, were underage girls in school uniforms who would be led to an upstairs bedroom for what Maxwell called interviews for “modeling” positions. Farmer witnessed Epstein’s lawyer and friend, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, head upstairs where the girls were present, the affidavit stated.

Dershowitz has denied Farmer’s accusations. “Maria Farmer stopped working for Epstein before I ever met Epstein,” Dershowitz told The Daily Beast. “It’s a totally perjured affidavit. It’s all totally made up. For her lawyers to submit these obviously perjured affidavits raises serious questions about their role in this case.”

In the summer of 1996, Epstein allegedly arranged for Farmer to work on a special art project at Leslie Wexner’s mansion in New Albany, Ohio. Farmer and her two younger brothers stayed at the property at the time.

Farmer claims Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her at the Ohio property, and Wexner’s security team refused to let her leave. She said she tried calling the sheriff’s office but didn’t get a response. Her father had to drive from Kentucky to help her.

Once she returned to New York, Farmer visited the NYPD’s sixth precinct to report the Ohio assault, but offers there told her to contact the FBI. Farmer called the feds, but they didn’t appear to take any action, the affidavit states.

Meanwhile, Farmer claims Epstein and Maxwell preyed on her 15-year-old sister, molesting her at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico. Epstein also held her sibling’s hand at a New York movie theater, where he “was rubbing her in a sexual manner without my knowledge,” Farmer added.

“I was terrified of Maxwell and Epstein and I moved a number of times to try to hide from them,” Farmer stated of the powerful pair’s alleged threats against her and their alleged efforts to sabotage her reputation in the art world.

Another accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has long claimed that Epstein and Maxwell abused minor girls across the country and abroad, and that Epstein loaned his victims out to his famous friends, including Dershowitz and Prince Andrew.

Giuffre filed a declaration in 2015 as part of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act suit and detailed Epstein’s alleged sex ring. She said she met Epstein in 1999 after Maxwell approached her during her summer job at Mar-a-Lago. She was 15 years old.

Dershowitz and Prince Andrew vehemently denied Giuffre’s claims, and Buckingham Place quickly released a statement: “It is emphatically denied that HRH The Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts. The allegations made are false and without any foundation.”

“The story is totally made up,” Dershowitz told the BBC after Giuffre’s court filing made international headlines. He added, “My only feeling is if she’s lied about me, which I know to an absolute certainty she has, she should not be believed about anyone else.”

“It wasn’t just sexual training—they wanted me to be able to cater to all the needs of the men they were going to send me to.”

Maxwell allegedly offered Giuffre professional training in massages. But when Giuffre arrived at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, she was allegedly forced into sexual activity with the billionaire and would become trapped in his web.

She said that when she began “working” for Epstein, he flew her to New York on his private jet and molested her at his Manhattan mansion. “I was trained to be ‘everything a man wanted me to be,’” Giuffre said in the declaration. “It wasn’t just sexual training—they wanted me to be able to cater to all the needs of the men they were going to send me to.”

Maxwell and Epstein allegedly ordered Giuffre to pay attention to what the men wanted, so she could report back to them. Giuffre said she traveled with Epstein from 1999 through the summer of 2002, to his homes in New York, New Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Paris, France.

“I had sex with him often in these places and also with the various people he demanded that I have sex with,” Giuffre stated. “Epstein paid me for many of these sexual encounters. In fact, my only purpose for Epstein, Maxwell and their friends was to be used for sex.”

Giuffre added that “Epstein had sex with underage girls on a daily basis” and that his interest in minor girls was “obvious” to those in his orbit. His code word for this abuse was “massage,” and Maxwell would often have sex with the victims, too, Giuffre claimed.

Maxwell denied Giuffre’s claims as early as 2011, after Giuffre gave an interview to the Daily Mail, releasing a statement that claimed “the allegations made against me are abhorrent and entirely untrue and I ask that they stop.”

In 2015, Maxwell called Giuffre’s allegations “obvious lies,” and Giuffre filed a defamation suit against the socialite. The Miami Herald and other news outlets have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to unseal all pleadings in that case, which was settled in 2017. Paul Cassell, one of Giuffre’s lawyers, told the court that if the records are made public, they “will show that Epstein and Maxwell were trafficking girls to the benefit of his friends, including Mr. Dershowitz.”

Epstein allegedly forced Giuffre to have sex with Britain’s Prince Andrew at least three times, including during an orgy. (The court filing includes a photo of “Andy” putting his arm around Giuffre’s partially bare waist, while Maxwell smiles in the background.)

Giuffre said she was also forced to have sex with another Epstein confidant, Jean Luc Brunel, who runs the MC2 modeling agency.

Brunel supplied Epstein with girls as young as 12, luring aspiring models from poor countries or poor backgrounds to the United States, Giuffre alleged. “Jeffrey Epstein has told me that he has slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls, and everything that I have seen confirms this claim,” Giuffre stated. (Brunel, in a previous statement, denied being involved “in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of” and said “I have exercised with the utmost ethical standard for almost 40 years.”)

Giuffre said she finally escaped Epstein’s abuse after he sent her to Thailand to learn Thai massage and to recruit another young girl for his alleged sex ring. Instead, Giuffre met her future husband and relocated to Australia.

Years later, in 2011, two FBI agents from Florida visited Giuffre to discuss Epstein. In another declaration, Giuffre said the investigators “seemed like they were being blocked from doing what they wanted to do—which I thought was to arrest Epstein and his powerful friends for all their illegal sexual crimes.”

In 2014, Giuffre tried to contact the FBI again for an update on the Epstein investigation. “I have never been able to figure out who was (and still is) stopping a prosecution,” Giuffre stated in the declaration.

“Because nothing is being done,” Giuffre added, “it makes me think that Epstein was right when he told me he had so many people in his pocket. Maybe those people are still helping him escape being prosecuted for what he did against me.

“The justice system doesn’t seem to respond to the victims in this case. It seems to favor those who have the most money and power and influence.”

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Wonder if he'll snitch

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Wonder if he'll snitch

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This motherfucker and those around him need to hang.

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I had Easter Lunch with him.....Ghislaine Maxwell was there as well....she was one of his alleged pimps.  I wonder if this will get her, a billionaire?

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NY? Soooooo... What does he have on Trump?  

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I'll wait for more sources before I believe it

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Isn't he the guy with the fuck island?

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Good.  Hope he gets ass fucked to death in the pen.

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I wonder how many big name politicians he could take down with him?

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Lock his ass up.

Disbar his attorney.

Prosecute everyone involved.

Expose all the shit.

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https://cdn-03.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article35118300.ece/0e0ca/AUTOCROP/w620h342/Bill-Clinton-debate.jpg

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Intradasting.  I'm sorry, I still think that "Pizza Gate" was a thing.  

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yea he has dirt on the Clintons

Topline: A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered that 167 documents in a lawsuit that alleges famously well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein participated in a sex-trafficking ring should be unsealed—and that many of his powerful friends could be named.

In its 27-page decision, the court cited the public’s right to access the case information outweighed the privacy of certain individuals, “including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”
Virginia Guiffre (now Roberts) filed the lawsuit against Ghislane Maxwell, alleging that she had used her as part of a sex trafficking network of underage girls to Epstein and a number of his famous friends, including his lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. Both men denied the accusations.
Dershowitz has supported unsealing the documents, according to the Daily Beast.
The documents will not be immediately available, as anonymous individuals involved in the case have two weeks to file appeals.
The court advised the documents be read carefully. “We therefore urge the media to exercise restraint in covering potentially defamatory allegations, and we caution the public to read such accounts with discernment,” wrote the court in its decision.

Key background: Epstein had previously been charged in 2007 in a 53-page indictment. As the Miami Herald revealed in its investigative series “Perversion of Justice,” Epstein managed to escape all federal charges through a plea deal that gave him and all of his coconspirators immunity, with all documents being sealed. Epstein ended up pleading guilty to one state prostitution charge in Florida. He then registered as a sex offender and paid unspecified restitution to three dozen victims identified by the FBI.

The contentious plea deal was orchestrated by U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta, now President Trump’s secretary of labor. The Miami Herald’s reporting prompted calls for Acosta to resign, but he has remained in his Cabinet post.

In February, a U.S. district judge determined federal prosecutors, including Acosta, broke the law by failing to notify victims before Epstein pleaded guilty to the Florida prostution charge. That decision could potentially nullify Epstein’s plea deal, opening him up to new federal charges. But prosecutors are challenging this ruling.

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He'll be dead from a suicide shortly.

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Agreed, but I'm not sorry for believing it.

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... sure would be nice if he rolled over on Bill Clinton and other smarmy fuckers that joined him in his lowely escapades

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Some of the stories got a little weird, but alot of the evidence was right out there for every one to see.

Instead of talking about the evidence, people devolved into arguing about disposing of bodies in pizza ovens. The misinformation that was spread all over the internet, including on this site, was sickening.