Jeffrey Epstein’s Power and Wealth Must Not Be a Shield in the America We Want to Live in

Only the most naive would believe that power and wealth aren’t the best defense for the guilty. This is what makes the stomach-turning case against mega-rich financier Jeffrey Epstein so much the more galling. We don’t want to believe that what happened in his case could happen in a nation under rule of law. But it did happen. Epstein got away with amounted to a slap on the wrist in his first case for abusing girls - spending a little more than a year in “jail.” In fact, he had the privilege of spending most days at his plush Palm Beach office where he entertained guests including, as The Miami Herald called it, “female friends.”Our hope is that new charges against Epstein will spotlight the scourge of sex trafficking in a way that will produce a new national resolve to confront this darkness. According to a federal indictment unsealed Monday in New York, Epstein "sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes" in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida and other locations. Between 2002 and 2005, the indictment states, Epstein created a “vast network of underaged victims for him to sexually exploit” and paid the victimized girls hundreds of dollars to recruit other young girls. Investigators also announced that they seized a large cache of nude photographs of young women from Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse.  Continue reading...