Federal prosecutors prepared an indictment of Jeffrey Epstein in 2007 that would have charged him with sex trafficking, and grand jurors heard months of testimony on the case, records from the Justice Department show.
Epstein, three of his employees and two of his companies would have been charged in a draft indictment that accused him of abusing girls as young as 14. A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent also testified to a grand jury in May 2007 about how Epstein groomed girls for sexualized massages, according to the records. The documents don’t indicate whether the grand jury was ever asked to vote on the draft indictment.
Details about the 60-count indictment and the testimony have not previously been made public. The records show that Count 51 involved the sex trafficking of a minor referred to as Jane Doe Number 3, and prosecutors would have charged Epstein companies that owned his Gulfstream jet and Boeing 727.
The indictment itself has not been released. Yet transcripts describing it offer insight into the peril Epstein faced from charges that the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida drafted but set aside to negotiate a non-prosecution agreement. As part of that deal, Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two less serious prostitution charges in state court. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.
Epstein resumed his lifestyle of mingling with celebrities and business leaders as young women visited his homes in Palm Beach, in New York, in the US Virgin Islands and in New Mexico. US prosecutors in New York indicted Epstein in 2019 on sex trafficking charges, accusing him of abusing girls. He died in jail that August in what authorities said was a suicide.
Epstein’s victims have long denounced the failure of federal prosecutors in Florida to indict him in 2007, saying their inaction enabled the abuse of hundreds of women.
“What I’ve said for the last 15 years holds true — the indictment that was prepared is the indictment that should have been served on him,” said attorney Brad Edwards, who represented about 200 Epstein victims. “Had the Southern District of Florida gone forward with that proper indictment, it would have saved a lot of people.”
Alexander Acosta, the former US attorney who oversaw the decision not to bring federal charges after the first investigation, has said he was concerned that state law might better apply, and some victims might not have withstood attacks on their credibility if the case went to trial.
The records describing the draft indictment were among thousands of documents and photographs released over the weekend by the Justice Department. Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation in November compelling the department to make the files public. President Donald Trump had resisted the legislation but relented and signed it under pressure from Republican lawmakers.
Those records included transcripts of testimony to a grand jury that Assistant US Attorney Marie Villafana used to collect evidence against Epstein. She drafted a 53-page indictment and an 82-page prosecution memo, according to a 2020 Justice Department report that examined the integrity of the federal investigation.
Bloomberg has reported that Villafana also opened a money laundering investigation of Epstein, and asked the grand jury to issue subpoenas for “every financial transaction conducted by Epstein and his six businesses” dating to 2003. It’s unclear whether the indictment that prosecutors drafted included a money laundering charge.
In the transcripts, the Justice Department redacted names, including those of the prosecutor and an FBI agent. On May 8, 2007, an FBI agent testified about one girl who began giving Epstein topless massages when she was 15, and who said she recruited other girls. That girl only spoke candidly to the FBI after getting a grant of immunity against prosecution, the agent said.
She said she loved Epstein and referred to him as an “awesome guy,” the agent said. He also discussed the viewpoint of an expert witness who said offenders often groomed “compliant victims” who were adolescents and particularly vulnerable to abuse.
The prosecutor and agent then discussed the indictment and photographs of the four proposed defendants: Epstein and three employees. The document included charges against two companies; one owned Epstein’s Boeing 727, the other owned his Gulfstream G1159B, according to the testimony.
The agent cited evidence including interviews of girls and their recruiters, flight manifestos, call records and documents seized by Palm Beach Police. The agent identified and showed photographs of victims identified as Jane Does 1 through 5.
Grand jurors, who met in secret and had heard evidence on the case for several months, questioned prosecutors about the witnesses. They asked about the strength of the evidence, the nature of the charges and whether they could be corroborated.
“We were told back in February that one of the girls when interviewed had alleged rape, and I hadn’t heard about that allegation recently,” one grand juror asked.
The agent responded that Epstein “forcibly put her on the table” but the rest of his response is redacted. He said the woman, referred to as Jane Doe Number 6, would be discussed in the next grand jury session.
In that session, on May 15, 2007, a grand juror asked: “Couldn’t they put anything in this indictment about stalking her, are there any rules against stalking children?”
A grand juror also asked: “What does Epstein do for work, how does he make his money?”
The agent said he was an investor who manages portfolios valued at $1 billion or more, and his best known client was the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a reference to businessman Les Wexner, who founded the company that owned the brand at that time.
Aside from the grand jury transcripts, the Justice Department also released an interview that department officials conducted in 2019 with Acosta, the former US Attorney who chose not to proceed with the indictment in 2007. The non-prosecution agreement included a grant of immunity to four Epstein employees.
“The public looked at these cases differently in 2006,” Acosta told lawyers with the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR. “There’s been a lot of changes in victim shaming, and the degree to which all of that is permitted.”
Acosta, who was appointed labor secretary in 2017, resigned from that post in 2019 after federal prosecutors in New York indicted Epstein on sex trafficking charges. Epstein’s victims have castigated Acosta’s resolution of the case, arguing he didn’t do enough hold the former financier accountable for his actions.
In 2020, OPR concluded Acosta and four others did not commit professional misconduct in handling the case but said he showed “poor judgment.”
The non-prosecution agreement, the report said, was “too difficult to administer, leaving Epstein free to manipulate the conditions of his sentence to his own advantage. The agreement relied on state authorities to implement its key terms, leading to an absence of control by federal authorities over the process.”
In a statement, Acosta attorney Jeffrey Neiman said federal prosecutors and the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office acknowledged “evidentiary challenges” at the time.
“Mr. Acosta took responsibility for approving the final resolution, admitting that relying on the state system was a mistake,” Neiman said. But he said, “Epstein served jail time, registered as a sex offender, and was ordered to compensate victims, sending a message to the community that Epstein’s conduct was unacceptable.”
The DOJ report also said that Acosta failed to fully pursue investigative steps, like securing computers seized from Epstein’s house by Palm Beach Police. That could have identified other victims and increased the leverage of US prosecutors in negotiating with defense lawyers, the report said.
In an interview spanning 11 hours, Acosta told DOJ officials “the law has become much more aggressive” on sex trafficking.
“I don’t think anyone in the office was questioning the pain or the suffering of the victims,” he said at the time. “The issues were how would they hold up in court.”
Attorney Spencer Kuvin, who represented nine victims, said Acosta’s concern about victim credibility is “patently absurd.”
Prosecutors, he said, reached decisions “that made absolutely no sense to the lawyers that were advocating on behalf of the victims at the time, and specifically with respect to credibility of these victims. You had multiple victims that the FBI agents had interviewed, and frankly, the agents I was speaking with at the time were mortified that there were no charges being filed.”