Eleven years after letting Jeffrey Epstein off lightly with a secret deal, federal prosecutors made another run at putting the billionaire financier behind bars on sex charges, accusing him Monday of abusing dozens of underage girls as young as Epstein, who was arrested over the weekend as he arrived in the U.
Prosecutors said they would seek to keep him in jail while he awaits trial, contending that the world traveler might flee β or try to intimidate witnesses β if released on bail. Epstein was accused of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars in cash for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York from through He also allegedly paid some of his victims to recruit additional girls.
Geoffrey Berman of New York said that the non-prosecution agreement that spared Epstein from a heavy prison sentence on similar allegations a decade ago is binding only on federal prosecutors in Florida, where the deal was made, not on authorities in New York. We are proud to be standing up for them by bringing this indictment. He was being held at the federal lockup in Manhattan. Virgin Islands, where he owns an island. Under the once-secret deal β overseen by Alexander Acosta, who was the U.
He avoided a possible life sentence and served 13 months in jail during which he was allowed out to go to his office during the day.
The deal also required that he reach financial settlements with dozens of his alleged victims and register as a sex offender. Acosta has defended the agreement as appropriate, though the White House said in February that it was looking into his handling of the case. The new charges were brought by the public corruption unit within the U. Berman would not comment on why that was so, and he cautioned against reading anything into it. The non-prosecution agreement, examined in detail in a series of stories in the Miami Herald, is being challenged in federal court in Florida.
