Jeffrey Epstein case: US court reveals transcripts of state charges of trafficking and sexual abuse of minors

ORA Florida court on Monday released previously sealed grand jury transcripts from 2008 in the criminal case against financier Jeffrey Epstein for child sex trafficking and abuse.

The records include testimony from a 16-year-old girl who said that when she was 14, an older friend encouraged her to visit Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach, north of Miami, where she would receive $200 for a 40-minute massage.

Another teenager told detectives she was at Epstein’s home “hundreds of times” in the early 2000s, when she was 16. She testified that the financial mogul He paid her $200 for each time she gave him a nude massage and gave her $1,000 the first time he sexually assaulted her.

Another minor, whose name was redacted in the transcript, said a friend invited her to Epstein’s home when she was 17 and assured her she could earn $200 if she gave him a massage.

According to records, the minor felt uncomfortable when Epstein tried to touch her and that’s when the businessman told her he would give her $200 more for each friend she brought to his residence. “The younger, the better,” he told her.

Although the Palm Beach Police Department had brought a case that included at least two dozen similar victims, the grand jury ended up indicting Epstein on only two misdemeanor prostitution charges rather than the felony assault charges police had anticipated.

Epstein managed to evade serious charges, in part because the Palm Beach prosecutor at the time, Barry Krischer decided to charge him with lesser charges of prostitution.

The records were kept out of public view for 16 years until Florida’s current governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, signed an order in February to release the files by Monday, July 1.

Is about transcripts of state charges of trafficking and sexual abuse of minors filed in 2006 against Epstein, who was found dead in a New York prison in 2019, where he was awaiting trial for allegedly creating a child sex trafficking network.

Epstein was charged in 2006 with sexually abusing girls as young as 14 and pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution under Florida law.

That year, through a secret agreement with the Florida Attorney General’s Office that has been criticized years later by the Department of Justice, Epstein pleaded guilty to the charges, served 13 months in prison and registered as a sex offender.

After The Miami Herald reported that many more minors and women had been abused by Epstein, he was arrested in 2019 in New York on federal sex trafficking charges.

He ultimately committed suicide that same year in a New York jail, where he remained after being formally accused of abusing and exploiting dozens of teenagers both in his mansion in Manhattan (New York) and in his residence in Palm Beach (Florida) and his property in the Virgin Islands.

Epstein, who federal prosecutors had accused of paying hundreds of underage girls to perform massages at his homes in Florida and New York, where he then sexually harassed them, He was 66 years old when he committed suicide.