Florida
The Jeffrey Epstein grand jury records are sealed. This judge seems unlikely to unseal them.
Long-sealed grand jury records that could reveal whether Palm Beach prosecutors sabotaged their own case against child molester Jeffrey Epstein will likely remain hidden from the public, at least for now, a county judge signaled Wednesday.
The county’s chief judge, Krista Marx, appeared poised to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Palm Beach Post that sought to open the documents, which have been sealed since 2006, but had not issued a decision from the bench following a hearing at the Palm Beach County Courthouse Wednesday morning.
Grand jury testimony and evidence is kept secret in Florida and can only be opened if it can be shown that the proceedings were tainted by wrongdoing.
At the hearing, Marx criticized the Post’s lawsuit, pointing out a legal technicality that she said is reason to dismiss the suit. Marx has previously said that she doesn’t understand why the records should be made public.
Elected to the bench in 1998, Marx didn’t hide her scorn for the effort to pressure Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Aronberg and the county clerk, Sharon Bock, to turn over the records. She said Aronberg doesn’t have them, and Bock won’t release them without a court order, which is essentially what the Post was seeking on Wednesday.
“Why should the clerk and the state attorney have to defend a civil action? They can’t give you what they don’t have,’’ Marx said. “The records cannot be released without a court order.’’
In January, Marx labeled an attempt by a special prosecutor appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to investigate the Epstein case “a fishing expedition,’’ and refused to unseal the documents. The prosecutor believes the documents could shed light on whether there was any undue influence that corrupted the state’s case.
In recent years, evidence has emerged suggesting that then-state attorney Barry Krischer and his lead prosecutor, Lanna Belohlavek, bowed to pressure from the politically connected Epstein, a multimillionaire financier who died in August at a federal prison in Manhattan where he was awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.
Epstein, 66, hired some of the country’s most powerful lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, to provide legal muscle to thwart the criminal investigation. The state probe, by the Town of Palm Beach police, centered on allegations that Epstein had been recruiting young girls in and around Palm Beach to sexually abuse under the pretense that he was paying them for “massages.’’
A number of questions have been raised about how Krischer and Belohlavek handled and disposed of the case in 2008. Records show, for example, that Belohlavek sent a letter to Epstein’s lawyer, Guy Fronstin, prior to the grand jury proceedings, inviting him and Epstein to appear before the grand jury to present evidence. It’s not known whether Fronstin took them up on the offer.
Palm Beach police detective Joe Recarey, the lead investigator, was among those who did testify before the grand jury. In an interview with the Miami Herald in 2018, he said he was very disturbed that state prosecutors focused their case on only one victim, a girl who was 14 at the time she was molested by Epstein.
“I had 34 to 35 victims,’’ he said, explaining that their abuse ranged from inappropriate touching and fondling to sexual battery and rape.
Recarey, who has since died, told the Herald he also had piles of evidence to support their stories, including phone records, message pads and receipts; a statement from one of Epstein’s butlers and portions of a phone book that Epstein kept listing the names and phone numbers of most of the victims.
To Recarey’s knowledge, none of that evidence was presented to the grand jury, at least not by him, and he was the one who had compiled it.
He said prosecutors served subpoenas on only two victims, and the other was away at college and couldn’t return to Palm Beach in time for the hearing because she was only given two days notice.
.jpeg "download (39).jpeg")
“I came in with a binder that was that thick,’’ he said, showing a three-inch space between his fingers. “But what I was asked to testify to was very limited.’’
He said Belohlavek didn’t ask him anything about the other victims.
“She gave me the impression that she was not giving the grand jury the entire picture of what transpired,’’ Recarey said. “It made it appear that she was trying to downplay his crimes. That’s the impression I got based on the questions she asked me.’’
The grand jury proceedings were just one in a series of inexplicable moves on the part of state prosecutors. Recarey said he encountered roadblock after roadblock from prosecutors who frequently met and spoke with Epstein’s attorneys. Epstein’s attorneys hired private investigators to find dirt on the girls and their families in an effort to discredit them, and combed their social media pages to show they had been drinking beer and smoking marijuana, Recarey said. Pretty soon neither Krischer nor Belohlavek found the girls credible, even though their stories were almost identical and not all of them knew each other.
Recarey began talking to the FBI, and his chief of police, Michael Reiter, took the drastic step of demanding that Krischer remove himself from the case.
A 2018-19 investigation by the Herald, Perversion of Justice, re-examined the case and revealed for the first time that state prosecutors had slow-walked subpoenas and that some of the police’s intelligence was leaked to Epstein’s lawyers. When Palm Beach police officers arrived to search Epstein’s waterfront mansion, it was clear he had been tipped off ahead of time because all the computers were removed, leaving dangling wires.
As a result of the limited grand jury presentation, Epstein was indicted on a single count of solicitation of prostitution, which meant that Epstein would probably not serve any jail time. “There’s an old saying, that, depending on how you steer a grand jury, you can indict a ham and cheese sandwich,’’ Recarey said.
Records show that the FBI knew about the state’s poor handling of the case, but ultimately after compiling enough evidence to draft a 53-page indictment on sex trafficking charges, federal prosecutors, led at the time by former Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, gave the case back to Krischer. Epstein was able to convince Acosta and his lead prosecutor, Marie Villafana, to give him and unnamed accomplices immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to charges in state court. He pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor under the age of 18 and a related conspiracy charge. Epstein served 13 months in the county jail, and was released in 2009.
Epstein’s return to state court was also carefully calculated so that his victims wouldn’t appear for the sentencing and possibly derail the deal.
Belohlavek assured the judge that Epstein’s victims had been informed of the plea and that they were agreeable to the sentence. In fact, the victim who was attached to the plea was never told anything about the deal and almost none of the other victims were informed.
Epstein was re-arrested in July 2018 amid new interest in the case following the Herald’s series. His death was ruled a suicide.
If you served as a grand juror in the Epstein case, the Miami Herald would like to hear from you. Please reach out to jbrown@miamiherald.com
Comments