Today's installment of the Epstein Unraveling--my last, for my sanity's sake as well as my editor's--is how we got from the piddly jail time Epstein served in 2008, but through maneuvers by his lawyers and those supposed to be prosecuting him, he got out and continued abusing children for 10 more years with seemingly no repercussions, to 2019, when he was arrested and put in prison where he died.

Back in 2008, when Brad Edwards, one of the attorneys who has represented Epstein's victims on a pro bono basis for the past 18 years, learned about the surprise plea deal that got Epstein off easy, he immediately filed an emergency motion to block it. His petitions asked the court for two things. One, to invalidate the plea based on the Federal Crime Victim's Rights Act, which mandates certain rights for crime victims, including the right to be informed about plea agreements and the right to appear at sentencing. And two, to have Epstein's plea agreement unsealed. Federal prosecutors fought against the first claim for over a decade and argued against the second claim. By the time the agreement was unsealed a year later, and the survivors, attorneys, and public saw the non-prosecution agreement for the first time, Epstein had already been released from jail. The claim under the Crime Victims' Rights Act dragged on for more than a decade. When the court finally ruled that the prosecution had acted illegally, finding all the misconduct noted earlier, and finally released hundreds of emails between the Epstein legal team and the prosecution showing their illegal collusion, it was February 21, 2019.

No prosecutor then, nor ever, has faced consequences for what was found by the court to be illegal dealings. It's crazy. I googled these people and most of them are still in practice. Perhaps craziest of all, by the time of the ruling, the head of the Southern District of Florida, who had negotiated and signed off on the NPA, Alexander Acosta, had been appointed by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate as the United States Secretary of Labor, one of the biggest agencies in the federal government.

But throughout that decade, when the case was pending, dozens of civil lawsuits were filed, resulting in vital information on the case. Epstein sued Brad Edwards for malfeasance in representing the survivors against him. Edwards sued back for malicious prosecution. This case was the first time Epstein survivors had the opportunity to testify to Epstein's crimes in state court. Many other civil cases against Epstein settled out of court. The cases were sealed, again, sheltering him from public awareness of his crimes. These cases are all detailed in Edwards' book "Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein."

In 2015, Virginia Roberts Giuffre filed court papers claiming that as a minor, she was forced by Epstein to have sex with Prince Andrew. This is the first time there was a court record of an allegation that Epstein not only abused victims but trafficked them to other men to abuse. Andrew denied it and the case concluded in an out-of-court settlement. The same year, Giuffre sued Ghislaine Maxwell in federal court in New York, claiming that Maxwell defamed her in public statements.

That case was settled in 2017, but it became very important because lawsuits by media outlets to unseal those case records, which Giuffre supported, were successful in 2020, allowing access to the testimony about the allegations. Several other civil lawsuits were filed that year alleging Epstein and Maxwell operated an international sex trafficking operation. The same year, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill did an in-depth in-person interview of Virginia Giuffre, who for more than an hour spoke to them about her allegations against Epstein, Maxwell, Alan Dershowitz, and others. NPR reported here, www.npr.org/2019/11/05/776482189/abc-news-defends-its-epstein-coverage-after-leaked-video-of-anchor, in November 2019, that ABC received multiple calls from Dershowitz and others and did not broadcast the story. Recently revealed files show that Barack Obama's former White House counsel Catherine Ruemler who is now chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs, also worked on the effort to kill the story.

Another New York lawsuit alleged that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as young as 13 from across the world. The agency, established in 2005, called MC2, was owned by Jean-Luc Brunel, a frequent male guest on Epstein's plane, according to flight logs, who visited Epstein nearly 70 times during his 13 months in jail, and who lived in an Epstein-owned apartment in New York City for years. The Washington Post reported on Brunel's entanglement with Epstein here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/like-jeffrey-epsteins-accusers-justice-has-been-elusive-for-women-allegedly-abused-by-his-modeling-agent-friend/2019/08/17/d0f0c31c-bf6d-11e9-aff2-3835caab97f6_story.html. I also learned that Martiza Vasquez, who worked as a bookkeeper for MC2, said in sworn court depositions that Epstein invested $1 million in MC2 and paid directly for the visas of the girls brought to the U.S. to work for the company. She gave testimony that models as young as 13 lived in apartments controlled by Epstein in Manhattan and the agency employed scouts in South America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union to find girls to bring to the U.S.

Further, memos of phone messages found at Epstein's house from Brunel left cryptic messages. One from Brunel, taken by staff of Epstein for him in April, said, "He has a teacher for you to teach you Russian. She is two X eight years old, not blonde. Lessons are free and you can have first today if you call." Vasquez says that the agency employed 200 to 300 models and that it was not unusual for the agency to send a girl to an assignment with a wealthy client for $100,000, but that she would not be paid if she refused to be molested. Vasquez says that she was questioned by the FBI and tried to tell agents where to look for evidence. She says that she never heard back from the FBI about Epstein again.

In the newly released files, there are emails to Epstein from a scout at MC2, talking about finding "good ones in Kiev, Ukraine," and telling Epstein that Brunel told her not to introduce herself as an MC2 scout because of the attention, but to tell the girl she was recruiting that she was visiting her family. And to make friends with them and get their contact information.

She shares the good news that there are some girls who work in New York and Paris with "no visa issues." There are emails from a scout in Moscow telling Epstein that "he has a few girls to show you." In December 2020, Brunel was apprehended by Paris police while trying to flee an investigation into charges of rape and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation. He was found hanged in his jail cell in February 2022. Three months before Brad Edwards and his clients finally got their ruling proving the prosecutorial misconduct.

In November 2018, Julie K. Brown, investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, who had been investigating the story for a year, published a three-part series called "Perversion of Justice" that laid bare for the first time the collusion between state prosecutors and Jeffrey Epstein. This was the scam that resulted in his slap on the wrist in 2008 and enabled him to elude justice for over a decade. She later expanded it into a book of the same name.

Fourteen years into Chief Michael Reiter, Detective Joseph Recarey, and survivors risking everything to demand justice, and eight months after Brown's story broke, on July 6, 2019, the FBI arrested Jeffrey Epstein as he got off his plane from a holiday in Paris. They raided his Manhattan mansion. The Southern District of New York charged him on sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Less than a week later, Alexander Costa resigned as the Secretary of Labor. At Epstein's July 15 bond hearing, where he pleaded not guilty, the court had to decide if he would be released pending trial. His attorneys were offering up to $500 million bond to ensure he would be released. For the first time in federal court, survivors were there and were able to argue against it.

U.S. Attorney Ross Miller told the court that in the raid of his New York City home, FBI agents found hundreds if not thousands of pictures of naked children in his vault. In another safe, they found a trove of loose diamonds, stacks of cash, and a fake Austrian passport for Epstein under a new name and with a Saudi Arabian address, corroborating that he had an established escape plan. The house had a leaded room full of TV monitors recording every room in the house. Judge Richard Berman denied bond, and Epstein was taken to the security housing unit within the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where every inmate has a cellmate and guards check the cell every 30 minutes.

Eight days after he was taken in on July 23, Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell with injuries to his neck. As a result, he was put on suicide watch, held in an observation cell surrounded by windows with the lights left on. After six days, he returned to security housing unit SHU with his cellmate. According to newly released Epstein docs, that same day, July 29, Epstein lawyers spoke to the federal prosecutors about Epstein possibly corroborating, often code for being willing to rat out on others, which parallels his brother Mark's assertion, revealed in an FBI report in the first batch of Epstein files, that Epstein was killed because he was ready to name names. Ten days later, Epstein signed his last will and testament, placing all his fortune into a trust in the Virgin Islands valued at more than $577 million.

The next day, even though security policies at HSU require that each inmate have a cellmate, Epstein's was transferred out of his cell; no replacement was brought. On Aug. 10, Epstein was found dead in his cell. The night before his death, in violation of prison policy, he was escorted to a shower stall to make an unmonitored phone call. Even though inmates are required to be checked every 30 minutes, the two guards did not check on him after 10.30 p.m. Both cameras monitoring him somehow malfunctioned. Fox News reported here, https://www.livenowfox.com/news/epstein-prison-video-edit-discrepancy, that video footage of his cell, released by the DOJ this year to try to quell concerns about one minute missing from the original video, has approximately two minutes and 53 seconds removed.

Even though the DOJ described the released footage as the full raw surveillance video, it is a file stitched together using Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files. The metadata shows that it was edited and saved several times over a period of more than 3.5 hours on May 23, 2025, weeks before it was released. The video's aspect ratio shifts noticeably at several points. Newly released Department of Justice documents show that investigators reviewing the surveillance footage from the night of Epstein's death observed an orange-colored shape moving up the staircase toward the isolated lock tier where his cell was located at approximately 9:30 p.m.

None of this is conspiracy. This is all listed in the documents.

Gwen Ford Faulkenberry is an author, teacher and award-winning columnist from Ozark. Email her at gfaulkenberry@hotmail.com. Watch her vodcast here: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/podcast/smalltowngirl/

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