“ALL LICENSED BAR ATTORNEYS – ATTORNERS – IN THE U.S. OWE THEIR ALLEGIANCE AND GIVE THEIR SOLEMN OATH IN PLEDGE TO THE CROWN TEMPLE, REALIZING THIS OR NOT.
This is simply due to the fact that all Bar Associations throughout the world are signatories and franchises to the international Bar Association located at the Inns of Court at Crown Temple. Although they vehemently deny it, all Bar Associations in the U.S., such as the American Bar Association, the Florida Bar, or California Bar Association, are franchises to the Crown.
The Inns of Court to the Crown Temple use the Banking and Judicial system of the City of London – a sovereign and independent territory which is not a part of Great Britain (just as Washington City, as DC was called in the 1800s, is not a part of the north American states, nor is it a state) to defraud, coerce, and manipulate the American people. These Fleet Street bankers and lawyers are committing crimes in America under the guise and color of law. They are known collectively as the “Crown.” Their lawyers are actually Templar Bar Attornies, not lawyers.” – Source
Everyone knows Alison Natahn was appointed by Obama and previously served as associate White House counsel for President Barack Obama. What else?
“In 2004, Nathan served as Associate National Counsel for Kerry-Edwards 2004. She also served as the voter protection coordinator in several primary elections on behalf of the Obama campaign and continues to advise the campaign on election law and voter protection issues and was a fellow at NYU Law School and a visting Professor at Fordham University Law School until assuming her post as White House Assc. Counsel. In February of 2011, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York nominated Alison to become a Federal Judge for the Southern District of New York.”
On November 17, 2021, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Nathan to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; her nomination was sent to the Senate the following day. President Biden nominated Nathan to the seat being vacated by Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, who will take senior status upon confirmation of her successor.Her nomination is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At Cornell, she was a member of the Quill and Dagger secret society
“This senior honor society formed in Cornell University is considered one of the most prominent of all societies, up there with Yale’s Skull and Bones. Even the New York Times wrote that it was seriously hard to get into, back in 1929, calling it “The highest non-scholastic honor within reach of undergraduates.” Names of all newly tapped members are published in The Cornell Daily Sun every semester, while meetings and activities remain closed.
Many members of the university’s staff are alumni of the society, and two sons, a grandson and grandson-in-law of the university’s president Jacob Gould Schurman were members. Between the years of 1913-1984, one former Quill and Dagger member could be found in the US congress every year. There are currently members in the Obama administration including Deputy Secretary of Labor Seth Harris and Associate Counsel to the President Alison J. Nathan. It’s rumored that hotelier Andre Balias (who has been linked to high profile stars including Salma Hayek) is a Quill and Dagger alumni.” – The Richest Magazine, 2014
The meetings and proceedings of Quill and Dagger are closed, and the society’s contributions and activities on campus are typically concealed. Membership remained secret for a brief period after its founding, but the names of newly tapped members are now published in The Cornell Daily Sun each semester.
Thomas W. Jones[31] (1969) – Chairman and CEO of Citigroup‘s Global Investment Management (1999–2004); President and COO of TIAA-CREF (1993–1997); created the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony at Cornell University; spokesman for students in the Willard Straight Hall takeover in 1969; Cornell University trustee
Walter C. Teagle[2] (1900) – President (1917–1937) and Chairman (1937–1942) of Standard Oil [Rockefeller]; namesake and donor of Cornell University’s Teagle Hall; Cornell University trustee
James J. Cosgrove[72] (1909) – General Counsel (1929–1948) and Chairman (1948–1952) of Continental Oil
George M. Schurman[14] (1913) – son of Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell University’s third president and U.S. Ambassador to China and Germany
Jacob Gould Schurman, Jr.[16] (1917) – Chief Magistrate of New York City; Cornell University trustee; son of Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell University’s third president and U.S. Ambassador to China and Germany
CORNELL’S War Memorial
From Wikipedia:
Beginning in 1925, Quill and Dagger members spearheaded the erection of a permanent memorial to Cornellians who served in the First World War. Based on the suggestion of F. Ellis Jackson, a Quill and Dagger member, the architectural plan for West Campus was modified to include the War Memorial structure. Funds for its construction were raised from alumni by a committee chaired by Robert E. Treman, also a society member. The War Memorial was dedicated on May 23, 1931 with a national radio address by President Herbert Hoover. It was erected in remembrance of the 264 Cornellian casualties and nearly 9,000 Cornellians who served during the war. It is the largest of several tributes to military service and sacrifice at Cornell University.
Because of Quill and Dagger’s contributions to the War Memorial’s construction, the society was granted exclusive use of the top floors of the northern tower.[27] The inscription above the entrance to the building reads, “This tower is a memorial to the men of Quill and Dagger who in giving their lives for their country were true to Cornell traditions.” The mural in the first floor War Memorial Shrine also depicts a quill and a dagger prominently, although official descriptions discuss their meaning as a palm and sword.[25]
The War Memorial structure is filled with symbolism relevant to the society and its ideals. For example, six symbols appear on shields around the top of the Quill and Dagger Tower.[citation needed] The east and west sides of the Tower depict four historic variations of a cross: the Latin cross, Saint Andrew’s Cross, swastika, and Maltese cross. These four symbols have varying heraldic, religious, and secular meanings including loyalty, piety, bravery, martyrdom, humility, and sacrifice. They also are connected with historic chivalric orders such as the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar. The south side of the tower depicts an ankh, which symbolizes life or the power to give and sustain life. Next to the ankh is a menorah, whose light has traditionally represented knowledge or enlightenment.
1. THE CO-DEFENDANTS
What leftoids and media won’t tell you is that Ghislaine is actually not sitting alone on that bench. So the web of interests is even more gigantic than we previously thought.
“It doesn’t seem right that only Maxwell is in the dock. There were others who facilitated the abuse and this makes it seem like it was only her”, one woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Telegraph.
“Ghislaine continues to have many friends. I know this because we receive mail, emails, letters and so forth from her friends, but we live in a world where people are cancelled for friendships of this type.”
BONUS: The Comeys. Or should I say “US Government”?
US Government should be a co-defendant in this trial, and, instead, it mocks the investigator, prosecutor and judge. What are the chances this turns out well?
This came up later, and surely there are plenty more items that can be added to a list such as this. Should I change the title to 4.5? Maybe not, as that’s about enough to make the point. But for what it’s worth, also contemplate this (and who knows what else I might add in the future).
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Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
If you’re familiar with our reports, George Church is no stranger to you either. He’s a founder figure for the Human Genome Project, CRISPR and The BRAIN Initiative. But he’s totally not getting the deserved attention, seeing that he’s just turned our world upside down. Not by himself, of course.
Meet George Church
Remember when Fauci and Big Tech joined efforts to keep us in the dark in regards to the mRNA impact on our genetics and DNA?
We’ve shown that there’s an entire new field of science that does just that: argues what Fauci said by using RNA to reprogram DNA. YouTube ad Facebook censored this.
Let’s see how are they going to argue this gentle giant of the science world and all his dark entanglements:
Professor at Harvard & MIT, co-author of 580 papers, 143 patent publications & the book “Regenesis”; developed methods used for the first genome sequence (1994) & million-fold cost reductions since (via fluor-NGS & nanopores), plus barcoding, DNA assembly from chips, genome editing, writing & recoding; co-initiated BRAIN Initiative (2011) & Genome Projects (GP-Read-1984, GP-Write-2016, PGP-2005:world’s open-access personal precision medicine datasets); machine learning for protein engineering, tissue reprogramming, organoids, xeno-transplantation, in situ 3D DNA, RNA, protein imaging.
George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of PersonalGenomes.org, which provides the world’s only open-access information on human Genomic, Environmental & Trait data (GET). His 1984 Harvard PhD included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing & barcoding. These led to the first genome sequence (pathogen, Helicobacter pylori) in 1994 . His innovations have contributed to nearly all “next generation” DNA sequencing methods and companies (CGI-BGI, Life, Illumina, Nanopore). This plus his lab’s work on chip-DNA-synthesis, gene editing and stem cell engineering resulted in founding additional application-based companies spanning fields of medical diagnostics ( Knome/PierianDx, Alacris, AbVitro/Juno, Genos, Veritas Genetics ) & synthetic biology / therapeutics ( Joule, Gen9, Editas, Egenesis, enEvolv, WarpDrive ). He has also pioneered new privacy, biosafety, ELSI, environmental & biosecurity policies. He is director of an IARPA BRAIN Project and NIH Center for Excellence in Genomic Science. His honors include election to NAS & NAE & Franklin Bower Laureate for Achievement in Science. He has coauthored 537 papers, 156 patent publications & one book (Regenesis).
He was part of a team of six[80] who, in a 2012 scientific commentary, proposed a Brain Activity Map, later named BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).[81] They outlined specific experimental techniques that might be used to achieve what they termed a “functional connectome“, as well as new technologies that will have to be developed in the course of the project,[80]including wireless, minimally invasive methods to detect and manipulate neuronal activity, either utilizing microelectronics or synthetic biology. In one such proposed method, enzymatically produced DNA would serve as a “ticker tape record” of neuronal activity. – Wikipedia
Wyss Institute Will Lead IARPA-Funded Brain Mapping Consortium
January 26, 2016
(BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University today announced a cross-institutional consortium to map the brain’s neural circuits with unprecedented fidelity. The consortium is made possible by a $21 million contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and aims to discover the brain’s learning rules and synaptic ‘circuit design’, further helping to advance neurally-derived machine learning algorithms.
The consortium will leverage the Wyss Institute’s FISSEQ (fluorescent in-situ sequencing) method to push forward neuronal connectomics, the science of identifying the neuronal cells that work together to bring about specific brain functions. FISSEQ was developed in 2014 by the Wyss Core Faculty member George Church and colleagues and, unlike traditional sequencing technologies, it provides a method to pinpoint the precise locations of specific RNA molecules in intact tissue. The consortium will harness this FISSEQ capability to accurately trace the complete set of neuronal cells and their connecting processes in intact brain tissue over long distances, which is currently difficult to do with other methods.
Awarded a competitive IARPA MICrONS contract, the consortium will further the overall goals of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, which aims to improve the understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat neuropathological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy. The consortium’s work will fundamentally innovate the technological framework used to decipher the principal circuits neurons use to communicate and fulfill specific brain functions. The learnings can be applied to enhance artificial intelligence in different areas of machine learning such as fraud detection, pattern and image recognition, and self-driving car decision making.
See how the Wyss-developed FISSEQ technology is able to capture the location of individual RNA molecules within cells, which will allow the reconstruction of neuronal networks in the 3-dimensional space of intact brain tissue. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University
“Historically, the mapping of neuronal paths and circuits in the brain has required brain tissue to be sectioned and visualized by electron microscopy. Complete neurons and circuits are then reconstructed by aligning the individual electron microsope images, this process is costly and inaccurate due to use of only one color (grey),” said Church, who is the Principal Investigator for the IARPA MICrONs consortium. “We are taking an entirely new approach to neuronal connectomics_immensely colorful barcodes_that should overcome this obstacle; and by integrating molecular and physiological information we are looking to render a high-definition map of neuronal circuits dedicated first to specific sensations, and in the future to behaviors and cognitive tasks.”
Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT.
To map neural connections, the consortium will genetically engineer mice so that each neuron is barcoded throughout its entire structure with a unique RNA sequence, a technique called BOINC (Barcoding of Individual Neuronal Connections) developed by Anthony Zador at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Thus a complete map representing the precise location, shape and connections of all neurons can be generated.
The key to visualizing this complex map will be FISSEQ, which is able to sequence the total complement of barcodes and pinpoint their exact locations using a super-resolution microscope. Importantly, since FISSEQ analysis can be applied to intact brain tissue, the error-prone brain-sectioning procedure that is part of common mapping studies can be avoided and long neuronal processes can be more accurately traced in larger numbers and at a faster pace.
In addition, the scientists will provide the barcoded mice with a sensory stimulus, such as a flash of light, to highlight and glean the circuits corresponding to that stimulus within the much more complex neuronal map. An improved understanding of how neuronal circuits are composed and how they function over longer distances will ultimately allow the team to build new models for machine learning.
The multi-disciplinary consortium spans 6 institutions. In addition to Church, the Wyss Institute’s effort will be led by Samuel Inverso, Ph.D., who is a Staff Software Engineer and Co-investigator of the project. Complementing the Wyss team, are co-Principal Investigators Anthony Zador, Ph.D., Alexei Koulakov, Ph.D., and Jay Lee, Ph.D., at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Adam Marblestone, Ph.D., and Liam Paninski, Ph.D. are co-Investigator at MIT and co-Principal Investigator at Columbia University, respectively. The Harvard-led consortium is partnering with another MICrONS team led by Tai Sing Lee, Ph.D. of Carnegie Mellon University as Principal investigator under a separate multi-million contract, with Sandra Kuhlman, Ph.D. of Carnegie Mellon University and Alan Yuille, Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins University as co-Principal investigators, to develop computational models of the neural circuits and a new generation of machine learning algorithms by studying the behaviors of a large population of neurons in behaving animals, as well as the circuitry of the these neurons revealed by the innovative methods developed by the consortium.
“It is very exciting to see how technology developed at the Wyss Institute is now becoming instrumental in showing how specific brain functions are wired into the neuronal architecture. The methodology implemented by this research can change the trajectory of brain mapping world wide,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. – WYSS Institute
IARPA is CIA’s DARPA. DARPA IS RAN BY PENTAGON AND IARPA BY CIA. IARPA IS EVEN MORE SECRETIVE, DARING AND SOCIOPATHIC.
Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS)
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)
Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. (BRAIN)
Full Rosetta brains in situ A. Activity (MICrONS = Ca imaging) (Alternative=Tickertape, see figure to right) B. Behavior (MICrONS & Alt = traditional video) C. Connectome (MICrONS & Alt = BOINC via Cas9-barcode) D. Developmental Lineage (via Cas9-barcode) E. Expression (RNA & Protein via FISSEQ)
Flagship Pioneering’s Scientists Invent a New Category of Genome Engineering Technology: Gene Writing
Tessera Therapeutics emerges from three years of stealth operations to pioneer Gene Writing™ as a new genome engineering technology and category of genetic medicine
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 7, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Flagship Pioneering today announced the unveiling of Tessera Therapeutics, Inc. a new company with the mission of curing disease by writing in the code of life. Tessera is pioneering Gene Writing™, a new biotechnology that writes therapeutic messages into the genome to treat diseases at their source.
Tessera’s Gene Writing platform is a potentially revolutionary breakthrough for genetic medicine that addresses key limitations of gene therapy and gene editing. Gene Writing technology can alter the genome by efficiently inserting genes and exons (parts of genes), introducing small insertions and deletions, or changing single or multiple DNA base pairs. The technology could enable cures for diseases that arise from errors in the genome, including monogenic disorders. It could also allow precise gene regulation in other diseases such as neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune disorders, and metabolic diseases.
“While profound advancements in genetic medicine over the last two decades had therapeutic promise for many previously untreatable diseases, the intrinsic properties of existing gene therapy and editing have significant shortcomings that limit their benefits to patients,” says Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Chairman of Tessera Therapeutics. “Our scientists have invented a new technology, called Gene Writing, that has the ability to write therapeutic messages into the genomes of somatic cells. We created Tessera to pioneer its applications for medicine. However, the breakthrough is broad and could be applied to many different genomes from humans to plants to microorganisms.”
A New Era of Genetic Medicine
Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., an MIT-trained biological engineer; Jacob Rubens, Ph.D., an MIT-trained synthetic biologist; and other scientists at Flagship Labs, the enterprise’s innovation foundry, co-founded Tessera in 2018 to create a platform that could design, make, and launch Gene Writing medicines. A General Partner at Flagship Pioneering, von Maltzahn has co-founded numerous biotechnology companies, including Sana Biotechnology, Indigo Agriculture, Kaleido Biosciences, Seres Therapeutics, and Axcella Health.
“DNA codes for life. But sometimes our DNA is written improperly, driving an enormous variety of diseases,” says von Maltzahn, Tessera’s Chief Executive Officer. “We started Tessera Therapeutics with a simple question: ‘What if Nature evolved a better solution than CRISPR for inserting curative therapeutic messages into the genome?’ It turns out that engineered and synthetic mobile genetic elements offer the potential to go beyond the limitations of gene editing technologies and allow Gene Writing. Our outstanding team of scientists is focused on bringing the vast promise of this new technology category to patients.”
Mobile genetic elements, the inspiration for Gene Writing, are evolution’s greatest genomic architect. The first mobile genetic element was discovered by Barbara McClintock, who won the 1983 Nobel Prize for revealing the mobile nature of genes. Mobile genetic elements code for the machinery to move or copy themselves into a new location in the genome, and they have been selected over billions of years to autonomously and efficiently “write” their DNA into new genomic sites. Today, mobile genetic elements are among the most abundant and ubiquitous genes in nature.
Over the past two years, Tessera has been mining genomes to discover novel mobile genetic elements and engineering them to create Gene Writing technology.
Tessera’s Gene Writers write therapeutic messages into the genome using RNA or DNA templates. RNA-based Gene Writing uses an RNA template and Gene Writer protein to either write a new gene into the genome or guide the rewriting of a pre-existing genomic sequence to make a small substitution, insertion, or deletion. DNA-based Gene Writing uses a DNA template to write a new gene into the genome.
By harnessing the biology of mobile genetic elements, Gene Writing holds the potential to overcome the limitations of current genetic medicine approaches by:
Efficiently writing small and large alterations to the genome of somatic cells with minimal reliance upon host DNA repair pathways, unlike nuclease-based gene editing technologies.
Permanently adding new DNA to dividing cells, unlike AAV-based gene therapy technologies.
Writing new DNA sequences into the genome by delivering only RNA.
Allowing repeated administration of treatments to patients in order to dose genetic medicines to effect, which is not possible with current gene therapies.
Tessera has licensed Flagship Pioneering’s intellectual property estate, which was begun in 2018 with seminal patent filings supporting both RNA and DNA Gene Writing technologies.
Tessera’s Scientific Advisory Board includes Luigi Naldini, David Schaffer, Andrew Scharenberg, Nancy Craig, George Church, Jonathan Weissman, and John Moran, who collectively have decades of experience in developing gene therapies and gene editing technologies, and also have commercial expertise from 4D, UniQure, Casebia, Cellectis, Magenta, and Editas. Tessera’s Board of Directors includes John Mendlein, Flagship Executive Partner and former CEO of multiple companies; Melissa Moore, Chair of Tessera’s Scientific Advisory Board, Chief Scientific Officer of Moderna, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and founding co-director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute; Geoffrey von Maltzahn; and Noubar Afeyan. The 30-person R&D team at Tessera has deep genetic medicine and startup expertise, including alumni from Editas, Intellia, Beam, Casebia, and Moderna.
About Tessera Therapeutics Tessera Therapeutics is an early-stage life sciences company pioneering Gene Writing™, a new biotechnology designed to offer scientists and doctors the ability to write and rewrite small and large therapeutic messages into the genome, thereby curing diseases at their source. Gene Writing holds the potential to become a new category in genetic medicine, building upon recent breakthroughs in gene therapy and gene editing, while eliminating important limitations in their reach, utilization and efficacy. Tessera Therapeutics was founded by Flagship Pioneering, a life sciences innovation enterprise that conceives, resources, and develops first-in-class category companies to transform human health and sustainability.
About Flagship Pioneering Flagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $34 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship is backed by more than $4.4 billion of aggregate capital commitments, of which over $1.9 billion has been deployed toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than $10 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 41 transformative companies, including Axcella Health (NASDAQ: AXLA), Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Foghorn Therapeutics, Indigo Ag, Kaleido Biosciences (NASDAQ: KLDO), Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Sana Biotechnology, Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), and Syros Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SYRS). – Flagship Pioneering
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Ghislaine Maxwell, George Soros, the Rockefellers, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos… if you’re like me, almost everyone you despise is invested in Save the Children Fund. But the worst thing about this charity is the performance, not the funding.
Save the Children – the Fairfield, Connecticut-based non-profit in the US – is formally known as Save The Children Federation, Inc. and is part of the Save the Children Alliance (a group of 30 Save the Children groups throughout the world that also support Save the Children International). Established in 1932, Save the Children is a 501 (c) (3) and one of the most well-known charities in the world.
In 2017, the organization raised $760 million (including $322 million in government grants and contributions) – $108 million more than the previous year – and spent $720 million primarily on grants ($528 million), staff compensation and benefits ($103 million), fees for services ($41 million), and office-related expenses ($19 million).
The remaining $40 million (the difference between the revenue reported and the revenue spent) was retained by the organization, contributing to the increase in net fixed assets to $241 million at year end.
That means about 1/3 of the money raised are used by the Fund owners and employees.
Save the Children reported having 1,639 employees in 2017. With total compensation costs of $103 million, the average compensation package was $63,000 although 231 individuals received more than $100,000 in total compensation.
The 20 most highly compensated individuals were reported to be:
$540,883: Carolyn S Miles, President and CEO
$404,737: Carlos Carrazana, EVP and COO
$349,875: Sumeet Seam, VP and General Counsel
$338,463: Stacy Brandom, VP and CFO
$307,673: Michael Klosson, VP Policy and Humanitarian Relief
$306,082: Nancy A Taussig, VP Resource Development
$301,709: Diana K Myers, VP International Programs
$278,659: Janine L Scolpino, Associate VP, Mass Market Fund
$256,347: Gregory A Ramm, VP Humanitarian Response
$250,847: Brian White, VP Deputy General Counsel and CCO
$248,423: Robert M Clay, VP
$231,989: Daniel Stoner, AVP Education and Child Development
$227,535: Dana L Langham, Associate VP, Chief Corp Development
$213,491: Mark Shriver, SVP, US Programs (as of 8/17) plus $182,915 from a related organization
$201,460: Kenneth G Murdoch, VP IT and Building OP (end 6/17)
$195,754: William Corwin, Sr VP, US Programs (2/17-8/17)
$190,167: Phillip DiSanto, VP IT and Building OP (as of 5/17)
$161,943: Andrea Williamson, Corporate Secretary
$153,622: Debbie Pollock-Berry, VP and Chief of HR (as of 6/17)
$150,466: Susan E Ridge, VP Marketing and Communications (end 6/17)
Of the 20 most highly compensated individuals, 11 are men and 9 are women. Of the 10 most highly compensated individuals, 5 are men and 5 are women.
$1 MILLION AND ABOVE Carnival Corporation & plc / Carnival Foundation Facebook Inc. Ferrari North America, Inc. Hachette Book Group Mars Wrigley Foundation (formerly Wrigley Company Foundation) Media Storm MNI Targeted Media, Inc. P&G Penguin Random House Pfizer and the Pfizer Foundation PlowShare Group PVH Corp. Scholastic Corporation The Walt Disney Company
$100,000 TO $1 MILLION Adobe Amazon AmeriCares Apple Arconic Foundation Baby2Baby BlackRock BNY Mellon Bombas Burt’s Bees Baby Cargill CHARLES & KEITH Chevron Chobani and the Chobani Foundation Citi Foundation Colgate-Palmolive Cummins Inc. Direct Relief Dollar General Corporation ExxonMobil Flex Foundation Gabriela Hearst Inc. Godiva Chocolatier Good360 Google.org Heart to Heart International Highgate Hotels Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Lutheran World Relief Mastercard Mattel, Inc. and its American Girl division Morgan Stanley New York Life & New York Life Foundation Nike Foundation PayPal PepsiCo Foundation Sempra Energy Foundation Target The Baupost Group, LLC The Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council, Inc. The Idol Gives Back Foundation The Microsoft Corporation The PwC Charitable Foundation, Inc. Toys “R” Us Voss Foundation Walmart Foundation Western Union Foundation
Corporate Council
Comprised of senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies, social impact consultancies and academia, the Corporate Council functions as a strategic sounding board for Save the Children. From cause marketing to technology for development, the council helps Save the Children deepen and evolve our work with the private sector in a mutually beneficial way. We are proud to recognize the thought leadership and advisory contributions of our 2018 Corporate Council members:
Pernille Spiers-Lopez,* IKEA North America (formerly), Council Chair
Perry Yeatman, Perry Yeatman Global Partners LLC, Council Vice Chair
David Barash, GE Foundation
Sean Burke, Accenture
Sarah Colamarino, Johnson & Johnson
Andrea E. Davis, The Walt Disney Company
Mark Freedman, Dalberg
Sebastian Fries, Columbia University
Jim Goldman,* Eurazeo
Rebecca Leonard, The TJX Companies, Inc.
PJ Lewis, Mattel, Inc.
Sean Milliken, PayPal
Christine Montenegro McGrath, Mondeléz International
Paul Musser, Mastercard
Sunil Sani,* Heritage Sportswear, LLC
*Also serves on our Board of Trustees
Foundation Partners
Ann Hardeman and Combs L. Fort Foundation Bainum Family Foundation Bezos Family Foundation Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Briar Foundation Bruderhof Communities The Catalyst Foundation for Universal Education The Charles Engelhard Foundation Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Cogan Family Foundation Comic Relief USA – The Red Nose Day Fund & Hand in Hand Hurricane Relief Community Foundation of Northern Colorado Connie Hillman Family Foundation Crown Family Philanthropies Derfner Foundation Dubai Cares Educate A Child, a programme of the Education Above All Foundation The Edward W. Brown, Jr. and Margaret G. Brown Endowment for Save the Children and Region A Partnership for Children, a fund of the North Carolina Community Foundation FIA Foundation GHR Foundation The Gottesman Fund Harrington Family Foundation Hau’oli Mau Loa Foundation The Hearst Foundation, Inc. Heising-Simons Foundation Humanity United / Freedom Fund Kenneth S. Battye Charitable Trust LDS Charities MacMillan Family Foundation Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies Margaret A. Meyer Family Foundation Margaret E. Dickins Foundation Martin F. Sticht Charitable Fund Matthew W. Jacobs & Luann Jacobs Charitable Fund New Hampshire Charitable Foundation Oak Foundation Open Society Foundations (George Soros) Owenoke Foundation Robert Wood Johnson Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation Roy A. Hunt Foundation Schultz Fund Share Our Strength SOMOS UNA VOZ South Texas Outreach Foundation STEM Next Opportunity Fund The Stone Family Foundation Wagon Mountain Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation World Impact Foundation Anonymous (9)
And that’s not all, see the full list of partners and sponsors on their own website.
Save the Children, Some Activity Highlights
1985
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for 2000 UK Pounds for the Save the Children Fund. Ghislaine meets Henry Thynne, Lord Bath and his wife Virginia. 13th September 1985. (Photos by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. Ghislaine meets Henry Thynne, Lord Bath and his wife Virginia. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The Mirror organised a Disney day out for the kids at Lord and Lady Bath’s Longleat House, in Wiltshire. A great fun day in which Ghislaine Maxwell presented a cheque for ú2000 for the save the children fund. 13th September 1985. (Photo by George Phillips/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
2000
‘Save The Children’ Receives $50 Million Grant From The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to push vaccines and birth control in Africa and Asia.
Political stunts with children’s money? Why not, we make anything look like charity. “Last week, Save the Children weighed into the controversy surrounding Madonna’s attempt to adopt a child in Malawi. Recently it created a new head of UK campaigning to enhance its profile as the country’s leading organisation for defending “children’s rights”. Its current advertising pitch is aimed at persuading the Chancellor to give £3 billion more in his Budget later this month”, writes Philip Johnston, The Telegraph columnist. He follows: “You could be forgiven for thinking that charities are forbidden from political activism by their tax-free status. Yet the Charity Commission’s own guidelines state that it “can be [a] legitimate and valuable activity”. In other words, the charity is fully entitled to campaign, and operate in the UK; but I am equally at liberty not to give it any money if it no longer does what it says on the rattling tin. Save the Children says the money for its UK venture is not coming from its regular contributors but from corporate donors. But that is beside the point.”
2015
“Another children’s charity was rocked last night after a senior executive at Save The Children resigned over allegations of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ “, Daily Mail reports.
Chief strategist Brendan Cox denied allegations against him but left in September. The charity’s £160,000-a-year chief executive Justin Forsyth has also resigned for unconnected reasons.
Both were senior advisers to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Mr Cox’s wife, Jo, is a Labour MP and former aide to Mr Brown’s wife Sarah. Mrs Cox also runs the Labour Women’s Network where she is ‘equalities and discrimination’ adviser.
Mr Cox, Save The Children’s director of policy and advocacy, left in September after complaints against him by women members of staff. A well-placed source said Mr Cox strenuously denied any wrongdoing but agreed to leave his post, according to Daily Mail.
2018
Alexia Pepper de Caires, an ex-Save The Children employee, says that sexual abuse in the charity sector is a systemic problem and that she had to storm her former employer’s boardroom to be heard, The Telegraph reported.
After investing millions in Save the Children, Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger finally honored with Save the Children’s Centennial Award. He received the trophy from the hands of Oprah Winfrey, star of Epstein’s flight logs. The event was hosted by Jennifer Garner and speakers included Save the Children CEO Carolyn Miles and Disney Legend Oprah Winfrey, Disney informed on their website.
2020
Leaked details of the inquiry, published in the Times, in which the commission accused Save the Children of “serious failures and mismanagement” of the way it dealt with the allegations in 2015, led to calls for the resignation of Kevin Watkins, the charity’s chief executive. He said “no”.
This is just a figment of the larger picture, just to say “watch you hashtag” to whoever made #Savethechildren trend on social media lately (Fakebook’s Suckerborg mainly, we know it was him)
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All done with support from the Rothschild bankers of JPMorgan Chase
Now we know the purpose of this meeting at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011. from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Mr. Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser.
Is NYT talking about the same fund here, or where there more? “Employees of Mr. Gates’s foundation also paid multiple visits to Mr. Epstein’s mansion. And Mr. Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund — an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein.
“His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Mr. Gates emailed colleagues in 2011, after his first get-together with Mr. Epstein.
Bridgitt Arnold, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, said he “was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence — and Epstein’s habit of spontaneously bringing acquaintances in to meet Mr. Gates.” …
As the details of the fund were being hammered out, Mr. Staley told his JPMorgan colleagues that Mr. Epstein wanted to be brought into the discussions, according to two people familiar with the talks. Mr. Epstein was an important JPMorgan customer, holding millions of dollars in accounts at the bank and referring a procession of wealthy individuals to become clients of the company.
Mr. Epstein pitched an idea for a separate charitable fund to JPMorgan officials, including Mr. Staley, and to Mr. Gates’s adviser Mr. Nikolic. He envisioned a vast fund, seeded with the Gates Foundation’s money, that would focus on health projects around the world, according to five people involved in or briefed on the talks, including current and former Gates Foundation and JPMorgan employees. In addition to the Gates money, Mr. Epstein planned to round up donations from his wealthy friends and, hopefully, from JPMorgan’s richest clients.” – NYTimes
No surprise Epstein worked with JPMorgan, remember Dershovitz said he too was introduced to Epstein “by lady de Rothschild”.
“One of the best reporters of his generation . . . a gifted storyteller and thorough reporter.” —New York Review of Books
“A first draft of history that reminds us just how bizarre these times really are. A New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Stewart has assembled a gripping blow-by-blow account of President Trump’s years-long showdown with the FBI — from the first inklings of something about an email server through the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election . . . Encountering it all smashed between the pages of a single book is a new experience, less the stop-start jerkiness of a tweetstorm than the slow-build dread of a dramatic tragedy . . . . The events recounted in ‘Deep State’ help explain how we ended up at our latest impasse and how Trump is likely to react as it unfolds. What makes the book more than a recitation of unseemly facts is its well-rendered human drama.” — The Washington Post
About the Author
James B. Stewart is the author of Tangled Webs, Heart of a Soldier, Blind Eye, Blood Sport, and the blockbuster Den of Thieves. He is currently a columnist for TheNew York Times and a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism, and in 1988 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
Ghislaine Maxwell actually spoke at least NINE times in front of United Nations assemblies, promoting some weird globalist financial schemes (see earlier posts); this is one of the speeches.
By the way, those fact-checking presstitutes from rhino-media and social media lied to you again, Ghislaine DID speak 9 times for the UN, it says so in her official bio presented at TED x Westchester Digital Summit 2014.
I wonder why they deleted this from their channel…
“Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell operated a mysterious company called TerraMar that pushed the UN to issue passports for the ocean, listed a Manhattan property owned by the Rothschilds as a base, and was funded by the Clinton Foundation. (News Punch, July 9, 2020)
“Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s mysterious company TerraMar, which closed down permanently just six days after Epstein’s arrest, appears to tie much of it together.
“The TerraMar Project was non-profit company that Ghislaine Maxwell started in 2012. Jeffrey Epstein and various other high power financiers funded the venture.
“The company described itself as an ocean conservation group but it shut down by 2019 over sex trafficking crimes stemming from Epstein’s arrest. It was only six days after Jeffrey Epstein was brought into custody that the firm announced it was shutting down permanently. The company had immediate support from globalist organizations including the Clinton Foundation.
“Maxwell attended multiple United Nations (UN) meetings and even spoke to the council as the founder of TerraMar. Ghislaine and another man from the company’s Board of Directors, Scott Borgerson, spoke in Washington DC at a special event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.”
What Newspunch missed is that Borgerson was her boyfriend, rumored “secret husband” at the time. But this is not even half the story, see below!
The “tech entrepreneur” who is rumored to be married to Ghislaine Maxwell once boasted to his family that he was dating “a high profile woman,” according to a report.
Scott Borgerson, 43, reportedly left his wife Rebecca, the mother of his two children, for Maxwell in 2014, although his estranged father said he knew nothing about Maxwell’s ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The Sun reported.
Borgerson has not responded to further requests for comment since he last spoke with Business Insider in August 2019.
Borgerson’s company has raised nearly $23 million from investors, which include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt led a $10 million funding round for CargoMetrics in August 2017, according to PitchBook.”
According to New York Times, Borgerson was working forthe Arctic Circle and we shouldn’t then be too surprised Ghislaine got to speak there, on the same stage with Hillary Clinton, as I reported before:
“In an effort to rebrand herself from jet-setting cosmopolitan to oceanic conservationist, Ms. Maxwell had in 2012 founded and appointed herself C.E.O. of the TerraMar Project, an opaque organization that had no offices and gave no grants to other organizations. It was disbanded in 2019.
Its biggest accomplishment was helping Ms. Maxwell maintain social capital. Associating herself with Mr. Borgerson — the founder of a maritime investments company called CargoMetrics and a former fellow in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he wrote about oceanic issues — added to her credibility.
Mr. Borgerson was called a director at the TerraMar Project, although he never had a job there. Ms. Maxwell supplied him and CargoMetrics with introductions to people on her contacts list.
In 2007, he became a fellow in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank whose officers and directors have included Colin Powell; the philanthropist David Rockefeller; and Robert Rubin, the secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. While at the the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Borgerson wrote for a magazine it publishes called Foreign Affairs about the effect of global warming on the Arctic region.
His residency as an International Affairs fellow ended in 2008, a spokeswoman for the organization said, and Mr. Borgerson spent another two years as a Visiting Fellow for Oceans Governance, working offsite.
In 2010, he founded Cargometrics, a “maritime innovation company” that uses data systems to study shipping patterns, from which the company determines what goods are being sent where and in what quantities and then bases investment decisions on the results. (For example, in February of this year, the firm used its data on cargo from China to surmise that imports from there were “in free-fall” because of the coronavirus.)
Back when Mr. Borgerson was writing for Foreign Affairs, there weren’t a lot of articles being published about oceanic conservation, said Dagfinnur Sveinbjornsson, the C.E.O. of the Arctic Circle, an organization dedicated to economic and environmental issues in the region.
Mr. Borgerson’s were “among the most prominent,” he said in an interview. “That’s what led to his involvement in the Arctic Circle.”
Mr. Borgerson was picked to serve on its advisory board and moderate a discussion about “Business in the Arctic” at the organization’s annual assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2013.
Conferences are a strange business. Big issues are often on the agenda, but the events can also (in prepandemic times) serve as glorified cocktail hours and public relations opportunities for people seeking to make connections and enhance their reputations as philanthropists, whether or not they even have a substantial record of working on the causes they’re discussing.
This category included Ms. Maxwell, who spoke at the Reykjavik conference and did not have the organization’s endorsement, according to Mr. Sveinbjornsson. According to British tabloids, it was there that Ms. Maxwell made the acquaintance of Mr. Borgerson.”
Sure, and they fell in love because their environmental agendas were original, but almost identical, by coincidence. We’re big fans of coincidence theories here at SILVIEW.media!
NYT goes on saying that “He was the father of two young children with his wife, Rebecca, to whom he had been married since 2001, public records show.
In 2014, he filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Ms. Borgerson obtained a restraining order from Mr. Borgerson. (It was later dismissed.) In legal filings, she claimed that he drank too much, hit her and threatened to beat her in front of the children.
Ms. Maxwell was smitten with Mr. Borgerson, stating over and over again how “hot” and “brilliant” he was, according to a person who worked with the TerraMar Project and agreed to speak to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, concerned the association would draw censure from environmentalists.
Ms. Maxwell also described the relationship between Mr. Borgerson and his ex-wife to this person as having become cordial, adding that much of her life now involved making lunch for his children and driving them to school.
After Mr. Epstein’s 2019 indictment on sex trafficking charges, the enormous interest in Ms. Maxwell led reporters to Mr. Borgerson, who admonished them for peddling gossip.
They would be far better off, hesaid, writing about the Jones Act, an esoteric maritime regulation from 1920 that stipulates that all ships on the water traveling between United States ports be built on United States shores and be owned by United States citizens. (It has recently become a point of contention between economists who see it as senselessly protectionist and others who contend that it is essential to preventing terrorism.)
Many of Ms. Maxwell’s old friends were surprised to read in reports of court proceedings earlier this summer that she had gotten married. It remains possible either that she was not telling the truth or that her spouse is someone other than Mr. Borgerson.”
Actually, let’s better have a look at the official Ghislaine Maxwell / TerraMar partners, including the UN, as displayed on their former website:
Have you trusted your science autoritah today? Here she is at a two day seminar hosted in December 2013 by the Swedish Ministry of the Environment, the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management and the Embassy of Sweden in partnership with Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, SIWI and UNDP.
In 2017, Ghislaine participated with Terramar at the UN Oceans Conference in New York City. Take a good look at the event logo, I hope i reminds you of something:
SOURCELooks like they plan to build back better in the oceans too
Video produced by Ghislaine’s organization for the UN Oceans Conference 2017 NY pushing Agenda 2030 / “sustainable development” on Climate. You can hear her voice at 2:32 mark
Ghislaine Maxwell Bought In UN Via Amir Dossal on Terramar Board Also UN Briber Guterres Linked
SDNY COURTHOUSE, July 20 – Ghislaine Maxwell used the United Nations, as reported by Inner City Press whose questions about it UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres refuses.
Now we have more: long time UN operative Amir Dossal, also informed with UN bribers like Ng Lap Seng and Patrick Ho of CEFC China Energy, was on the board of directors of Maxwell’s shadowy Terramar. Inner City Press first made this link July 5, & now publishes 990. And here is Dossal introducing Maxwell as one of her nine visits to the UN, here.
After the death of Jeffrey Epstein in the MCC prison, on July 2 Acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Audrey Strauss announced and unsealed in indictment of Maxwell on charges including sex trafficking and perjury.
Inner City Press went to her press conference at the US Attorney’s Office and asked, Doesn’t charging Maxwell with perjury undercut any ability to use testimony from her against other, bigger wrong-doers? Periscope here at 23:07.
Strauss replied that it is not impossible to use a perjurer’s testimony. But how often does it work?
At 3:30 pm on July 2 Maxwell appeared in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampsire, before Magistriate Judge Andrea K. Johnstone. Inner City Press live tweeted it here. (Also live tweeted bail denial of July 14, here.)
In the July 3 media coverage of Maxwell, media all of the world used a video and stills from it of Maxwell speaking in front of a blue curtain, like here.
What they did not mention is something Inner City Press has been asking the UN about, as under UNSG Antonio Guterres with his own sexual exploitation issues (exclusive video and audio) it got roughed up and banned from the UN: Ghislaine Maxwell had a ghoulish United Nations press conference, under the banner of the “Terramar Project,” here.
On July 5, after some crowd-sourcing, Inner City Press reported on another Ghislaine Maxwell use of the United Nations, facilitated by Italy’s Permanent Representative to the UN, UN official Nikhil Seth and Amir Dossal, who also let into the UN and in one case took money from convicted UN briber Ng Lap Seng, and Patrick Ho of CEFC China Energy, also linked to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
At the Ghislaine Maxwell UN event, the UN Deputy Secretary General was directly involved.
List of (some of) the participants on Patreon here.
Inner City Press has published a phone of Maxwell in the UN with Dossal, here. But the connection runs deeper: Dossal with “25 years of UN involvement” was on Terrarmar’s board of directors, one of only five directors, only three not related to Maxwell by blood and name.
The directors: Ghislaine Maxwell, Christine Malina-Maxwell, Steven Haft, Christine Dennison and… Amir Dossal.
Dossal has operated through the UN Office of Partnership, with Antonio Guterres and his deputy Amina J. Mohammed, here.
And the links to the world of UN bribery, including Antonio Guterres through the Gulbenkian Foundation, runs deeper. More to follow.
Antonio Guterres claims he has zero tolerance for sexual exploitation, but covers it up and even participate in it. He should be forced to resign – and/or have immunity waived.
Terramar has been dissolved, even though Maxwell’s former fundraiser / director of development Brian Yurasits still lists the URL on his (protected) Twitter profile, also here.
But now Inner City Press has begun to inquire into Ghislaine Maxwell’s other United Nations connections, starting with this photograph of another day’s (or at least another outfit’s) presentation in the UN, here. While co-conspirator Antonio Guterres has had Inner City Press banned from any entry into the UN for two years and a day, this appears to be in the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber. We’ll have more on this, and on Epstein and the UN.
The case is US v. Maxwell, 20-cr-330 (Nathan).” – Inner City Press
Inner City Press is backed by the Terramar website, which has been dead for years, but I dug it out with the Wayback Machine. This is what I found out about the structure of her organization:
Ghislaine MAXWELL, Founder and President
Ghislaine Maxwell has a lifelong love and appreciation for the ocean. She is a successful businesswoman, holds a BA-MA from Oxford University, and is a helicopter, and deep worker submersible pilot and a certified EMT.
Rob Foos, Director of Development
Rob Foos holds a BS in Management from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He was a collegiate rugby player, winning a national championship. He commanded a ship, served on three regional fishery management councils, and led fundraising efforts across the federal government in south Florida. Growing up on the water in California, he loves exploring everything ocean related and is looking forward to his next adventure on the high seas.
Inge Solheim, Polar Ambassador
Inge Solheim is the world’s foremost polar guide and explorer. He led Prince Harry and injured soldiers on expeditions to the North and South Poles. Inge has also produced and co-produced many television series featuring some of the world’s most remote areas, witnessing firsthand the decline of the polar regions. A native Norwegian, he’s joining TerraMar to save the poles by bringing attention to the least explored part of the planet—the ocean.
Steven Haft
Steven Haft serves as Advisor at LiveLOOK, Inc. and serves as Chair of Allscreen Studios at Burson-Marsteller, LLC. As a producer, his productions have garnered 7 Oscar Nominations, 8 Emmy Nominations and a Peabody Award. He has served as Chief Strategy Officer of the interactive marketing group at AOL. He has a 15-year career in Politics, Law and Public Policy.
Amir Dossal
Amir Dossal is a 25-year veteran of the United Nations, and was the UN’s Chief Liaison for Partnerships. As Executive Director of the UN Office for Partnerships, he managed the $1 billion gift by media mogul Ted Turner; and forged strategic alliances to address the Millennium Development Goals.
MEET OUR EXPERTS IN OCEAN POLICY, SCIENCE, LAW, GOVERNANCE AND CONSERVATION IN THE HIGH SEAS
I’m not even done here, I’ve just done making my point, but more info will be added soon, developing.
UPDATES:
Here’s an excellent research that takes this further and greatly completes my work, kudos to Mouthy Buddha!
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.
It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush.
Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44, a U.S. special envoy to North Korea and corporate lawyer, the meeting was critical.
His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement— essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them.
“I don’t think anyone has been told the truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did,’’ said one of Epstein’s victims, Michelle Licata, now 30. “He ruined my life and a lot of girls’ lives. People need to know what he did and why he wasn’t prosecuted so it never happens again.”
Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Until he was reported to be eliminated on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, Acosta also had been included on lists of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.
Acosta did not respond to numerous requests for an interview or answer queries through email.
But court records reveal details of the negotiations and the role that Acosta would play in arranging the deal, which scuttled the federal probe into a possible international sex trafficking operation. Among other things, Acosta allowed Epstein’s lawyers unusual freedoms in dictating the terms of the non-prosecution agreement.
“The damage that happened in this case is unconscionable,” said Bradley Edwards, a former state prosecutor who represents some of Epstein’s victims. “How in the world, do you, the U.S. attorney, engage in a negotiation with a criminal defendant, basically allowing that criminal defendant to write up the agreement?”
As a result, neither the victims — nor even the judge — would know how many girls Epstein allegedly sexually abused between 2001 and 2005, when his underage sex activities were first uncovered by police. Police referred the case to the FBI a year later, when they began to suspect that their investigation was being undermined by the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office.
NOT A ‘HE SAID, SHE SAID’
“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.
More than a decade later, at a time when Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood actresses have become a catalyst for a cultural reckoning about sexual abuse, Epstein’s victims have all but been forgotten.
The women — now in their late 20s and early 30s — are still fighting for an elusive justice that even the passage of time has not made right.
Like other victims of sexual abuse, they believe they’ve been silenced by a criminal justice system that stubbornly fails to hold Epstein and other wealthy and powerful men accountable.
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein.
Over the past year, the Miami Herald examined a decade’s worth of court documents, lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents. Key people involved in the investigation — most of whom have never spoken before — were also interviewed. The Herald also obtained new records, including the full unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation and witness statements that had been kept under seal.
The Herald learned that, as part of the plea deal, Epstein provided what the government called “valuable consideration” for unspecified information he supplied to federal investigators. While the documents obtained by the Herald don’t detail what the information was, Epstein’s sex crime case happened just as the country’s subprime mortgage market collapsed, ushering in the 2008 global financial crisis.
Records show that Epstein was a key federal witness in the criminal prosecution of two prominent executives with Bear Stearns, the global investment brokerage that failed in 2008, who were accused of corporate securities fraud. Epstein was one of the largest investors in the hedge fund managed by the executives, who were later acquitted. It is not known what role, if any, the case played in Epstein’s plea negotiations.
The Herald also identified about 80 women who say they were molested or otherwise sexually abused by Epstein from 2001 to 2006. About 60 of them were located — now scattered around the country and abroad. Eight of them agreed to be interviewed, on or off the record. Four of them were willing to speak on video.
The women are now mothers, wives, nurses, bartenders, Realtors, hairdressers and teachers. One is a Hollywood actress. Several have grappled with trauma, depression and addiction. Some have served time in prison.
A few did not survive. One young woman was found dead last year in a rundown motel in West Palm Beach. She overdosed on heroin and left behind a young son.
As part of Epstein’s agreement, he was required to register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the three dozen victims identified by the FBI. In many cases, the confidential financial settlements came only after Epstein’s attorneys exposed every dark corner of their lives in a scorched-earth effort to portray the girls as gold diggers.
“You beat yourself up mentally and physically,’’ said Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, who said Epstein molested her when she was 14. “You can’t ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something. For me, it is the word ‘pure’ because he called me ‘pure’ in that room and then I remember what he did to me in that room.’’
Now, more than a decade later, two unrelated civil lawsuits — one set for trial on Dec. 4 — could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. The Dec. 4 case, in Palm Beach County state court, involves Epstein and Edwards, whom Epstein had accused of legal misdeeds in representing several victims. The case is noteworthy because it will mark the first time that Epstein’s victims will have their day in court, and several of them are scheduled to testify.
A second lawsuit, known as the federal Crime Victims’ Rights suit, is still pending in South Florida after a decade of legal jousting. It seeks to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement in hopes of sending Epstein to federal prison. Wild, who has never spoken publicly until now, is Jane Doe No. 1 in “Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2 vs. the United States of America,” a federal lawsuit that alleges Epstein’s federal non-prosecution agreement was illegal.
Federal prosecutors, including Acosta, not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.
“As soon as that deal was signed, they silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’ said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’
In court papers, federal prosecutors have argued that they did not violate the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because no federal charges were ever filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, an argument that was later dismissed by the judge.Play VideoDuration 0:00Virginia Roberts was working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited to be a masseuse to Palm Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. She was lured into a life of depravity and sexual abuse.
Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.
“She was taken advantage of twice — first by Epstein, and then by the criminal justice system that labeled a 14-year-old girl as a prostitute,’’ said Spencer Kuvin, the lawyer who represented the girl.
“It’s just outrageous how they minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’ said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women.
“There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.
It would be easy to dismiss the Epstein case as another example of how there are two systems of justice in America, one for the rich and one for the poor. But a thorough analysis of the case tells a far more troubling story.
A close look at the trove of letters and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent court documents, admitted was unorthodox.
Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.
‘AVOID THE PRESS’ PLAN
That included keeping the deal from Epstein’s victims, emails show.
“Thank you for the commitment you made to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,’’ Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after their breakfast meeting in West Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential.
“You … assured me that your office would not … contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants and the respective counsel in this matter,’’ Lefkowitz wrote.
In email after email, Acosta and the lead federal prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, acquiesced to Epstein’s legal team’s demands, which often focused on ways to limit the scandal by shutting out his victims and the media, including suggesting that the charges be filed in Miami, instead of Palm Beach, where Epstein’s victims lived.
“On an ‘avoid the press’ note … I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’ Villafaña wrote to Lefkowitz in a September 2007 email.
Federal prosecutors identified 36 underage victims, but none of those victims appeared at his sentencing on June 30, 2008, in state court in Palm Beach County. Most of them heard about it on the news — and even then they didn’t understand what had happened to the federal probe that they’d been assured was ongoing.
Edwards filed an emergency motion in federal court to block the non-prosecution agreement, but by the time the agreement was unsealed — over a year later — Epstein had already served his sentence and been released from jail.
“The conspiracy between the government and Epstein was really ‘let’s figure out a way to make the whole thing go away as quietly as possible,’ ’’ said Edwards, who represents Wild and Jane Doe No. 2, who declined to comment for this story.
“In never consulting with the victims, and keeping it secret, it showed that someone with money can buy his way out of anything.’’
It was far from the last time Epstein would receive VIP handling. Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.
The sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, would not answer questions, submitted by the Miami Herald, about Epstein’s work release.
Neither Epstein nor his lead attorney, Jack Goldberger, responded to multiple requests for comment for this story. During depositions taken as part of two dozen lawsuits filed against him by his victims, Epstein has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, in one instance doing so more than 200 times.
In the past, his lawyers have said that the girls lied about their ages, that their stories were exaggerated or untrue and that they were unreliable witnesses prone to drug use.
In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender — the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.
A prosecutor under New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case. Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender accused of molesting so many girls.
“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward argument like this,’’ she said.
THE HOUSE ON EL BRILLO
The women who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion as girls tend to divide their lives into two parts: life before Jeffrey and life after Jeffrey.
Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an A-student at Lake Worth Middle School.
After she met Epstein, she was a stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in Florida’s Panhandle.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.
She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. Wild, who later helped recruit other girls, said Epstein preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further each time.
“By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in my life for years,” said Wild, who was released from prison in October after serving three years on drug charges.
The girls — mostly 13 to 16 — were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man — Epstein — a massage, according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the Herald.
The lead Palm Beach police detective on the case, Joseph Recarey, said Epstein’s operation worked like a sexual pyramid scheme.
“The common interview with a girl went like this: ‘I was brought there by so and so. I didn’t feel comfortable with what happened, but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn’t feel comfortable, I could bring someone else and still get paid,’ ’’ Recarey said.
During the massage sessions, Recarey said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls.
Recarey, in his first interview about the case, said the evidence the department collected to support the girls’ stories was overwhelming, including phone call records, copies of written phone messages from the girls found in Epstein’s trash and Epstein’s flight logs, which showed his private plane in Palm Beach on the days the girls were scheduled to give him massages.
Epstein could be a generous benefactor, Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young girl to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after one of his girls starred in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for one of the girls were discovered in a search of his mansion and trash. Police also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.
Epstein counseled the girls about their schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school, fashion design or acting. At least two of Epstein’s victims told police that they were in love with him, according to the police report.
The police report shows how uncannily consistent the girls’ stories were — right down to their detailed descriptions of Epstein’s genitalia.
“We had victims who didn’t know each other, never met each other and they all basically independently told the same story,’’ said Reiter, the retired Palm Beach police chief.
Reiter, also speaking for the first time, said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of young girls coming and going from his house, the frequency — sometimes several in the same day — and the young ages of the girls.
“It started out to give a man a back rub, but in many cases it turned into something far worse than that, elevated to a serious crime, in some cases sexual batteries,’’ he said.
Most of the girls said they arrived by car or taxi, and entered the side door, where they were led into a kitchen by a female staff assistant named Sarah Kellen, the report said. A chef might prepare them a meal or offer them cereal. The girls — most from local schools — would then ascend a staircase off the kitchen, up to a large master bedroom and bath.
They were met by Epstein, clad in a towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie facedown on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully, and direct them to massage his feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples, while he masturbated, according to the police report.
At times, if emboldened, he would try to penetrate them with his fingers or use a vibrator on them. He would go as far as the girls were willing to let him, including intercourse, according to police documents. Sometimes he would instruct a young woman he described as his Yugoslavian sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova, who was over 18, to join in, the girls told Recarey. Epstein often took photographs of the girls having sex and displayed them around the house, the detective said.
Once sexually gratified, Epstein would take a shower in his massive bathroom, which the girls described as having a large shower and a hot pink and mint green sofa.
Kellen (now Vickers) and Marcinkova, through their attorneys, declined to comment for this story.
NEVER ENOUGH
One girl told police that she was approached by an Epstein recruiter when she was 16, and was working at the Wellington mall. Over the course of more than a year, she went to Epstein’s house hundreds of times, she said. The girl tearfully told Recarey that she often had sex with Marcinkova — who employed strap-on dildos and other toys — while Epstein watched and choreographed her moves to please himself, according to the police report. Often times, she said, she was so sore after the encounters that she could barely walk, the police report said.
But she said she was firm about not wanting to have intercourse with Epstein. One day, however, the girl said that Epstein, unable to control himself, held her down on a massage table and penetrated her, the police report said. The girl, who was 16 or 17 at the time, said that Epstein apologized and paid her $1,000, the police report said.
Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her 8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald.
Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness.
“We were stupid, poor children,’’ said one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about Epstein. At the time, she said, she was 14 and a high school freshman.
“We just wanted money for school clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there. The girls who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein and the cops who championed their cause remain angry over what they regard as a gross injustice, while Epstein’s employees and those who engineered his non-prosecution agreement have prospered.
The woman, who went to Epstein’s home multiple times, said Epstein didn’t like her because her breasts were too big. The last time she went, she said, one girl came out crying and they were instructed to leave the house and had to pay for their own cab home.
Some girls told police they were coached by their peer recruiters to lie to Epstein about their ages and say they were 18. Epstein’s legal team would later claim that even if the girls were under 18, there was no way he could have known. However, under Florida law, ignorance of a sex partner’s age is not a defense for having sex with a minor.
Wild said he was well aware of their tender ages — because he demanded they be young.
“He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,’’ she said, explaining that as she grew older and had less access to young girls, Epstein got increasingly angry with her inability to find him the young girls he desired.
“If I had a girl to bring him at breakfast, lunch and dinner, then that’s how many times I would go a day. He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough.’’
THE PYRAMID CRUMBLES
Epstein’s scheme first began to unravel in March 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Palm Beach police that she had been molested by Epstein at his mansion. The girl reluctantly confessed that she had been brought there by two other girls, and those girls pointed to two more girls who had been there.
By the time detectives tracked down one victim, there were two and three more to find. Soon there were dozens.
“We didn’t know where the victims would ever end,” Reiter said.
Eventually, the girls told them about still other girls and young women they had seen at Epstein’s house, many of whom didn’t speak English, Recarey said. That led Recarey to suspect that Epstein’s exploits weren’t just confined to Palm Beach. Police obtained the flight logs for his private plane, and found female names and initials among the list of people who flew on the aircraft — including the names of some famous and powerful people who had also been passengers, Recarey said.
A newly released FBI report shows that at the time the non-prosecution deal was executed, the agency was interviewing witnesses and victims “from across the United States.” The probe stretched from Florida to New York and New Mexico, records show. The report was released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by Radar Online and was made available on the bureau’s website after the Miami Herald and other news organizations submitted requests, said Daniel Novack, the lawyer who filed the Freedom of Information Act case pro bono.
One lawsuit, still pending in New York, alleges that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil. The girls lived in a New York building owned by Epstein, who paid for their visas, according to the sworn statement of Maritza Vasquez, the one-time bookkeeper for Mc2, the modeling agency.
Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he said.
“The day that a sitting U.S. attorney is afraid of a lawyer or afraid of a defendant is a very sad day in this country,’’ said Fisten, now a private investigator for Edwards.
SUIT/COUNTERSUIT
Now, a complex web of litigation could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. A lawsuit, set for trial Dec. 4 in Palm Beach County, involves the notorious convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein, in whose law firm Edwards once worked.
In 2009, Epstein sued Edwards, alleging that Edwards was involved with Rothstein and was using the girls’ civil lawsuits to perpetuate Rothstein’s massive Ponzi operation. But Rothstein said Edwards didn’t know about the scheme, and Epstein dropped the lawsuit.
Edwards countersued for malicious prosecution, arguing that Epstein sued him to retaliate for his aggressive representation of Epstein’s victims.
Several women who went to Epstein’s home as underage girls are scheduled to testify against him for the first time.
Florida state Sen. Lauren Book, a child sex abuse survivor who has lobbied for tough sex offender laws, said Epstein’s case should serve as a tipping point for criminal cases involving sex crimes against children.
“Where is the righteous indignation for these women? Where are the protectors? Who is banging down the doors of the secretary of labor, or the judge or the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach County, demanding justice and demanding the right to be heard?’’ Book asked.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Villafaña, in court papers, said that prosecutors used their “best efforts’’ to comply with the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but exercised their “prosecutorial discretion’’ when they chose not to notify the victims. The reasoning went like this: The non-prosecution deal had a restitution clause that provided the girls a chance to seek compensation from Epstein. Had the deal fallen through, necessitating a trial, Epstein’s lawyers might have used the prior restitution clause to undermine the girls’ credibility as witnesses, by claiming they had exaggerated Epstein’s behavior in hopes of cashing in.
Acosta has never fully explained why he felt it was in the best interests of the underage girls — and their parents — for him to keep the agreement sealed. Or why the FBI investigation was closed even as, recently released documents show, the case was yielding more victims and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy beyond Palm Beach.
Upon his nomination by Trump as labor secretary in 2017, Acosta was questioned about the Epstein case during a Senate confirmation hearing.
“At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decided that a plea that guarantees someone goes to jail, that guarantees he register [as a sex offender] generally and guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing,’’ Acosta said of his decision to not prosecute Epstein federally.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in opposing Acosta for labor secretary, noted that “his handling of a case involving sex trafficking of underage girls when he was a U.S. attorney suggests he won’t put the interests of workers and everyday people ahead of the powerful and well-connected.’’
Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is one of the nation’s leading advocates for reforming laws involving sex crimes against children, said what Acosta and other prosecutors did is similar to what the Catholic Church did to protect pedophile priests.
“The real crime with the Catholic priests was the way they covered it up and shielded the priests,’’ Hamilton said. “The orchestration of power by men only is protected as long as everybody agrees to keep it secret. This is a story the world needs to hear.’’ – Miami Herald
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The information comes from a 1997 New Yorker article, before Trump entered politics and Ghislaine entered her public pimp fame. This was likely the least biased source you can ever find on this topic.
“One morning last week, Donald Trump, who under routine circumstances tolerates publicity no more grudgingly than an infant tolerates a few daily feedings, sat in his office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, his mood rather subdued. As could be expected, given the fact that his three-and-a-half-year-old marriage to Marla Maples was ending, paparazzi were staking out the exits of Trump Tower, while all weekend helicopters had been hovering over Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach. And what would come of it? “I think the thing I’m worst at is managing the press,” he said. “The thing I’m best at is business and conceiving. The press portrays me as a wild flamethrower. In actuality, I think I’m much different from that. I think I’m totally inaccurately portrayed.”
So, though he’d agreed to a conversation at this decisive moment, it called for wariness, the usual quota of prefatory “off-the-record”s and then some. He wore a navy-blue suit, white shirt, black-onyx-and-gold links, and a crimson print necktie. Every strand of his interesting hair—its gravity-defying ducktails and dry pompadour, its telltale absence of gray—was where he wanted it to be. He was working his way through his daily gallon of Diet Coke and trying out a few diversionary maneuvers. Yes, it was true, the end of a marriage was a sad thing. Meanwhile, was I aware of what a success he’d had with the Nation’s Parade, the Veterans Day celebration he’d been very supportive of back in 1995? Well, here was a little something he wanted to show me, a nice certificate signed by both Joseph Orlando, president, and Harry Feinberg, secretary-treasurer, of the New York chapter of the 4th Armored Division Association, acknowledging Trump’s participation as an associate grand marshal. A million four hundred thousand people had turned out for the celebration, he said, handing me some press clippings. “O.K., I see this story says a half million spectators. But, trust me, I heard a million four.” Here was another clipping, from the Times, just the other day, confirming that rents on Fifth Avenue were the highest in the world. “And who owns more of Fifth Avenue than I do?” Or how about the new building across from the United Nations Secretariat, where he planned a “very luxurious hotel-condominium project, a major project.” Who would finance it? “Any one of twenty-five different groups. They all want to finance it.”
Months earlier, I’d asked Trump whom he customarily confided in during moments of tribulation. “Nobody,” he said. “It’s just not my thing”—a reply that didn’t surprise me a bit. Salesmen, and Trump is nothing if not a brilliant salesman, specialize in simulated intimacy rather than the real thing. His modus operandi had a sharp focus: fly the flag, never budge from the premise that the universe revolves around you, and, above all, stay in character. The Trump tour de force—his evolution from rough-edged rich kid with Brooklyn and Queens political-clubhouse connections to an international name-brand commodity—remains, unmistakably, the most rewarding accomplishment of his ingenious career. The patented Trump palaver, a gaseous blather of “fantastic”s and “amazing”s and “terrific”s and “incredible”s and various synonyms for “biggest,” is an indispensable ingredient of the name brand. In addition to connoting a certain quality of construction, service, and security—perhaps only Trump can explicate the meaningful distinctions between “super luxury” and “super super luxury”—his eponym subliminally suggests that a building belongs to him even after it’s been sold off as condominiums.
Everywhere inside the Trump Organization headquarters, the walls were lined with framed magazine covers, each a shot of Trump or someone who looked an awful lot like him. The profusion of these images—of a man who possessed unusual skills, though not, evidently, a gene for irony—seemed the sum of his appetite for self-reflection. His unique talent—being “Trump” or, as he often referred to himself, “the Trumpster,” looming ubiquitous by reducing himself to a persona—exempted him from introspection.
If the gossips hinted that he’d been cuckolded, they had it all wrong; untying the marital knot was based upon straightforward economics. He had a prenuptial agreement, because “if you’re a person of wealth you have to have one.” In the words of his attorney, Jay Goldberg, the agreement was “as solid as concrete.” It would reportedly pay Marla a million dollars, plus some form of child support and alimony, and the time to do a deal was sooner rather than later. A year from now, she would become entitled to a percentage of his net worth. And, as a source very close to Trump made plain, “If it goes from a fixed amount to what could be a very enormous amount—even a small percentage of two and a half billion dollars or whatever is a lot of money—we’re talking about very huge things. The numbers are much bigger than people understand.”
The long-term matrimonial odds had never been terrifically auspicious. What was Marla Maples, after all, but a tabloid cartoon of the Other Woman, an alliteration you could throw the cliché manual at: a leggy, curvaceous blond-bombshell beauty-pageant-winning actress-model-whatever? After a couple of years of deftly choreographed love spats, Donald and Marla produced a love child, whom they could not resist naming Tiffany. A few months before they went legit, Marla told a television interviewer that the contemplation of marriage tended to induce in Donald the occasional “little freak-out” or visit from the “fear monster.” Her role, she explained, was “to work with him and help him get over that fear monster.” Whenever they travelled, she said, she took along her wedding dress. (“Might as well. You’ve got to be prepared.”) The ceremony, at the Plaza Hotel, right before Christmas, 1993, drew an audience of a thousand but, judging by the heavy turnout of Atlantic City high rollers, one not deemed A-list. The Trump Taj Mahal casino commemorated the occasion by issuing a Donald-and-Marla five-dollar gambling chip.
The last time around, splitting with Ivana, he’d lost the P.R. battle from the git-go. After falling an entire news cycle behind Ivana’s spinmeisters, he never managed to catch up. In one ill-advised eruption, he told Liz Smith that his wife reminded him of his bête noire Leona Helmsley, and the columnist chided, “Shame on you, Donald! How dare you say that about the mother of your children?” His only moment of unadulterated, so to speak, gratification occurred when an acquaintance of Marla’s blabbed about his swordsmanship. The screamer “best sex i’ve ever had”—an instant classic—is widely regarded as the most libel-proof headline ever published by the Post. On the surface, the coincidence of his first marital breakup with the fact that he owed a few billion he couldn’t exactly pay back seemed extraordinarily unpropitious. In retrospect, his timing was excellent. Ivana had hoped to nullify a postnuptial agreement whose provenance could be traced to Donald’s late friend and preceptor the lawyer-fixer and humanitarian Roy Cohn. Though the agreement entitled her to fourteen million dollars plus a forty-six-room house in Connecticut, she and her counsel decided to ask for half of everything Trump owned; extrapolating from Donald’s blustery pronouncements over the years, they pegged her share at two and a half billion. In the end, she was forced to settle for the terms stipulated in the agreement because Donald, at that juncture, conveniently appeared to be broke.Advertisement
Now, of course, according to Trump, things were much different. Business was stronger than ever. And, of course, he wanted to be fair to Marla. Only a million bucks? Hey, a deal was a deal. He meant “fair” in a larger sense: “I think it’s very unfair to Marla, or, for that matter, anyone—while there are many positive things, like life style, which is at the highest level— I think it’s unfair to Marla always to be subjected to somebody who enjoys his business and does it at a very high level and does it on a big scale. There are lots of compensating balances. You live in the Mar-a-Lagos of the world, you live in the best apartment. But, I think you understand, I don’t have very much time. I just don’t have very much time. There’s nothing I can do about what I do other than stopping. And I just don’t want to stop.”
A securities analyst who has studied Trump’s peregrinations for many years believes, “Deep down, he wants to be Madonna.” In other words, to ask how the gods could have permitted Trump’s resurrection is to mistake profound superficiality for profundity, performance art for serious drama. A prime example of superficiality at its most rewarding: the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a fifty-two-story hotel-condominium conversion of the former Gulf & Western Building, on Columbus Circle, which opened last January. The Trump name on the skyscraper belies the fact that his ownership is limited to his penthouse apartment and a stake in the hotel’s restaurant and garage, which he received as part of his development fee. During the grand-opening ceremonies, however, such details seemed not to matter as he gave this assessment: “One of the great buildings anywhere in New York, anywhere in the world.”
The festivities that day included a feng-shui ritual in the lobby, a gesture of respect to the building’s high proportion of Asian buyers, who regard a Trump property as a good place to sink flight capital. An efficient schmoozer, Trump worked the room quickly—a backslap and a wink, a finger on the lapels, no more than a minute with anyone who wasn’t a police commissioner, a district attorney, or a mayoral candidate—and then he was ready to go. His executive assistant, Norma Foerderer, and two other Trump Organization executives were waiting in a car to return to the office. Before it pulled away, he experienced a tug of noblesse oblige. “Hold on, just lemme say hello to these Kinney guys,” he said, jumping out to greet a group of parking attendants. “Good job, fellas. You’re gonna be working here for years to come.” It was a quintessential Trumpian gesture, of the sort that explains his popularity among people who barely dare to dream of living in one of his creations.
Back at the office, a Times reporter, Michael Gordon, was on the line, calling from Moscow. Gordon had just interviewed a Russian artist named Zurab Tsereteli, a man with a sense of grandiosity familiar to Trump. Was it true, Gordon asked, that Tsereteli and Trump had discussed erecting on the Hudson River a statue of Christopher Columbus that was six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty?
“Yes, it’s already been made, from what I understand,” said Trump, who had met Tsereteli a couple of months earlier, in Moscow. “It’s got forty million dollars’ worth of bronze in it, and Zurab would like it to be at my West Side Yards development”—a seventy-five-acre tract called Riverside South—“and we are working toward that end.”
According to Trump, the head had arrived in America, the rest of the body was still in Moscow, and the whole thing was being donated by the Russian government. “The mayor of Moscow has written a letter to Rudy Giuliani stating that they would like to make a gift of this great work by Zurab. It would be my honor if we could work it out with the City of New York. I am absolutely favorably disposed toward it. Zurab is a very unusual guy. This man is major and legit.”
Trump hung up and said to me, “See what I do? All this bullshit. Know what? After shaking five thousand hands, I think I’ll go wash mine.”
Norma Foerderer, however, had some pressing business. A lecture agency in Canada was offering Trump a chance to give three speeches over three consecutive days, for seventy-five thousand dollars a pop. “Plus,” she said, “they provide a private jet, secretarial services, and a weekend at a ski resort.”
How did Trump feel about it?
“My attitude is if somebody’s willing to pay me two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to make a speech, it seems stupid not to show up. You know why I’ll do it? Because I don’t think anyone’s ever been paid that much.”
Would it be fresh material?
“It’ll be fresh to them.”
Next item: Norma had drafted a letter to Mar-a-Lago members, inviting them to a dinner featuring a speech by George Pataki and entertainment by Marvin Hamlisch. “Oh, and speaking of the Governor, I just got a call. They’re shooting a new ‘I Love New York’ video and they’d like Libby Pataki to go up and down our escalator. I said fine.”
A Mar-a-Lago entertainment booker named Jim Grau called about a Carly Simon concert. Trump switched on his speakerphone: “Is she gonna do it?”
“Well, two things have to be done, Donald. No. 1, she’d like to hear from you. And, No. 2, she’d like to turn it in some degree into a benefit for Christopher Reeve.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Trump. “Is Christopher Reeve gonna come? He can come down on my plane. So what do I have to do, call her?”
“I want to tell you how we got Carly on this because some of your friends are involved.”
“Jim, I don’t give a shit. Who the hell cares?”
“Please, Donald. Remember when you had your yacht up there? You had Rose Styron aboard. And her husband wrote ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ And it’s through her good offices—”
“O.K. Good. So thank ’em and maybe invite ’em.”
Click.
“Part of my problem,” Trump said to me, “is that I have to do a lot of things myself. It takes so much time. Julio Iglesias is coming to Mar-a-Lago, but I have to call Julio, I have to have lunch with Julio. I have Pavarotti coming. Pavarotti doesn’t perform for anybody. He’s the highest-paid performer in the world. A million dollars a performance. The hardest guy to get. If I call him, he’ll do it—for a huge amount less. Why? Because they like me, they respect me, I don’t know.”
During Trump’s ascendancy, in the nineteen-eighties, the essence of his performance art—an opera-buffa parody of wealth—accounted for his populist appeal as well as for the opprobrium of those who regard with distaste the spectacle of an unbridled id. Delineating his commercial aesthetic, he once told an interviewer, “I have glitzy casinos because people expect it. . . . Glitz works in Atlantic City. . . . And in my residential buildings I sometimes use flash, which is a level below glitz.” His first monument to himself, Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-sixth Street, which opened its doors in 1984, possessed many genuinely impressive elements—a sixty-eight-story sawtoothed silhouette, a salmon-colored Italian-marble atrium equipped with an eighty-foot waterfall—and became an instant tourist attraction. In Atlantic City, the idea was to slather on as much ornamentation as possible, the goal being (a) to titillate with the fantasy that a Trump-like life was a lifelike life and (b) to distract from the fact that he’d lured you inside to pick your pocket.Advertisement
At times, neither glitz nor flash could disguise financial reality. A story in the Times three months ago contained a reference to his past “brush with bankruptcy,” and Trump, though gratified that the Times gave him play on the front page, took umbrage at that phrase. He “never went bankrupt,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, nor did he “ever, at any time, come close.” Having triumphed over adversity, Trump assumes the prerogative to write history.
In fact, by 1990, he was not only at risk, he was, by any rational standard, hugely in the red. Excessively friendly bankers infected with the promiscuous optimism that made the eighties so memorable and so forgettable had financed Trump’s acquisitive impulses to the tune of three billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars. The personally guaranteed portion—almost a billion—represented the value of Trump’s good will, putative creditworthiness, and capacity for shame. A debt restructuring began in the spring of 1990 and continued for several years. In the process, six hundred or seven hundred or perhaps eight hundred million of his creditors’ dollars vaporized and drifted wherever lost money goes. In America, there is no such thing as a debtors’ prison, nor is there a tidy moral to this story.
Several of Trump’s trophies—the Plaza Hotel and all three Atlantic City casinos—were subjected to “prepackaged bankruptcy,” an efficiency maneuver that is less costly than the full-blown thing. Because the New Jersey Casino Control Act requires “financial stability” for a gaming license, it seems hard to avoid the inference that Trump’s Atlantic City holdings were in serious jeopardy. Nevertheless, “blip” is the alternative “b” word he prefers, as in “So the market, as you know, turns lousy and I have this blip.”
Trump began plotting his comeback before the rest of the world—or, perhaps, even he—fully grasped the direness of his situation. In April of 1990, he announced to the Wall Street Journal a plan to sell certain assets and become the “king of cash,” a stratagem that would supposedly set the stage for a shrewd campaign of bargain hunting. That same month, he drew down the final twenty-five million dollars of an unsecured hundred-million-dollar personal line of credit from Bankers Trust. Within seven weeks, he failed to deliver a forty-three-million-dollar payment due to bondholders of the Trump Castle Casino, and he also missed a thirty-million-dollar interest payment to one of the estimated hundred and fifty banks that were concerned about his well-being. An army of bankruptcy lawyers began camping out in various boardrooms.
Making the blip go away entailed, among other sacrifices, forfeiting management control of the Plaza and handing over the titles to the Trump Shuttle (the old Eastern Airlines Boston-New York-Washington route) and a twin-towered thirty-two-story condominium building near West Palm Beach, Florida. He also said goodbye to his two-hundred-and-eighty-two-foot yacht, the Trump Princess, and to his Boeing 727. Appraisers inventoried the contents of his Trump Tower homestead. Liens were attached to just about everything but his Brioni suits. Perhaps the ultimate indignity was having to agree to a personal spending cap of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month.
It would have been tactically wise, to say nothing of tactful, if, as Trump’s creditors wrote off large chunks of their portfolios, he could have curbed his breathtaking propensity for self-aggrandizement. The bravado diminished somewhat for a couple of years—largely because the press stopped paying attention—but by 1993 he was proclaiming, “This year has been the most successful year I’ve had in business.” Every year since, he’s issued the same news flash. A spate of Trump-comeback articles appeared in 1996, including several timed to coincide with his fiftieth birthday.
Then, last October, Trump came into possession of what a normal person would regard as real money. For a hundred and forty-two million dollars, he sold his half interest in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, on Forty-second Street, to the Pritzker family, of Chicago, his longtime, and long-estranged, partners in the property. Most of the proceeds weren’t his to keep, but he walked away with more than twenty-five million dollars. The chief significance of the Grand Hyatt sale was that it enabled Trump to extinguish the remnants of his once monstrous personally guaranteed debt. When Forbes published its annual list of the four hundred richest Americans, he sneaked on (three hundred and seventy-third position) with an estimated net worth of four hundred and fifty million. Trump, meanwhile, had compiled his own unaudited appraisal, one he was willing to share along with the amusing caveat “I’ve never shown this to a reporter before.” According to his calculations, he was actually worth two and a quarter billion dollars—Forbes had lowballed him by eighty per cent. Still, he had officially rejoined the plutocracy, his first appearance since the blip.
Jay Goldberg, who in addition to handling Trump’s matrimonial legal matters also represented him in the Grand Hyatt deal, told me that, after it closed, his client confessed that the novelty of being unencumbered had him lying awake nights. When I asked Trump about this, he said, “Leverage is an amazing phenomenon. I love leverage. Plus, I’ve never been a huge sleeper.” Trump doesn’t drink or smoke, claims he’s never even had a cup of coffee. He functions, evidently, according to inverse logic and metabolism. What most people would find unpleasantly stimulating—owing vastly more than you should to lenders who, figuratively, at least, can carve you into small pieces—somehow engenders in him a soothing narcotic effect. That, in any event, is the impression Trump seeks to convey, though the point is now moot. Bankers, typically not the most perspicacious species on earth, from time to time get religion, and there aren’t many who will soon be lining up to thrust fresh bazillions at him.
When I met with Trump for the first time, several months ago, he set out to acquaint me with facts that, to his consternation, had remained stubbornly hidden from the public. Several times, he uttered the phrase “off the record, but you can use it.” I understood the implication—I was his tool—but failed to see the purpose. “If you have me saying these things, even though they’re true, I sound like a schmuck,” he explained. How to account, then, for the bombast of the previous two decades? Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor in the Koch administration, once quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” In time, this bon mot became misattributed to Leona Helmsley, who was only too happy to claim authorship. Last fall, after Evander Holyfield upset Mike Tyson in a heavyweight title fight, Trump snookered the News into reporting that he’d collected twenty million bucks by betting a million on the underdog. This prompted the Post to make calls to some Las Vegas bookies, who confirmed—shockingly!—that nobody had been handling that kind of action or laying odds close to 20-1. Trump never blinked, just moved on to the next bright idea.
“I don’t think people know how big my business is,” Trump told me. “Somehow, they know Trump the celebrity. But I’m the biggest developer in New York. And I’m the biggest there is in the casino business. And that’s pretty good to be the biggest in both. So that’s a lot of stuff.” He talked about 40 Wall Street—“truly one of the most beautiful buildings in New York”—a seventy-two-story landmark that he was renovating. He said he owned the new Niketown store, tucked under Trump Tower; there was a deal to convert the Mayfair Hotel, at Sixty-fifth and Park, into “super-super-luxury apartments . . . but that’s like a small one.” He owned the land under the Ritz-Carlton, on Central Park South. (“That’s a little thing. Nobody knows that I own that. In that way, I’m not really understood.”) With CBS, he now owned the Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., and Miss Universe beauty pageants. He pointed to a stack of papers on his desk, closing documents for the Trump International Hotel & Tower. “Look at these contracts. I get these to sign every day. I’ve signed hundreds of these. Here’s a contract for two-point-two million dollars. It’s a building that isn’t even opened yet. It’s eighty-three per cent sold, and nobody even knows it’s there. For each contract, I need to sign twenty-two times, and if you think that’s easy . . . You know, all the buyers want my signature. I had someone else who works for me signing, and at the closings the buyers got angry. I told myself, ‘You know, these people are paying a million eight, a million seven, two million nine, four million one—for those kinds of numbers, I’ll sign the fucking contract.’ I understand. Fuck it. It’s just more work.”Advertisement
As a real-estate impresario, Trump certainly has no peer. His assertion that he is the biggest real-estate developer in New York, however, presumes an elastic definition of that term. Several active developers—among them the Rudins, the Roses, the Milsteins—have added more residential and commercial space to the Manhattan market and have historically held on to what they built. When the outer boroughs figure in the tally—and if Donald isn’t allowed to claim credit for the middle-income high-rise rental projects that generated the fortune amassed by his ninety-one-year-old father, Fred—he slips further in the rankings. But if one’s standard of comparison is simply the number of buildings that bear the developer’s name, Donald dominates the field. Trump’s vaunted art of the deal has given way to the art of “image ownership.” By appearing to exert control over assets that aren’t necessarily his—at least not in ways that his pronouncements suggest—he exercises his real talent: using his name as a form of leverage. “It’s German in derivation,” he has said. “Nobody really knows where it came from. It’s very unusual, but it just is a good name to have.”
In the Trump International Hotel & Tower makeover, his role is, in effect, that of broker-promoter rather than risktaker. In 1993, the General Electric Pension Trust, which took over the building in a foreclosure, hired the Galbreath Company, an international real-estate management firm, to recommend how to salvage its mortgage on a nearly empty skyscraper that had an annoying tendency to sway in the wind. Along came Trump, proposing a three-way joint venture. G.E. would put up all the money—two hundred and seventy-five million dollars—and Trump and Galbreath would provide expertise. The market timing proved remarkably favorable. When Trump totted up the profits and calculated that his share came to more than forty million bucks, self-restraint eluded him, and he took out advertisements announcing “The Most Successful Condominium Tower Ever Built in the United States.”
A minor specimen of his image ownership is his ballyhooed “half interest” in the Empire State Building, which he acquired in 1994. Trump’s initial investment—not a dime—matches his apparent return thus far. His partners, the illegitimate daughter and disreputable son-in-law of an even more disreputable Japanese billionaire named Hideki Yokoi, seem to have paid forty million dollars for the building, though their title, even on a sunny day, is somewhat clouded. Under the terms of leases executed in 1961, the building is operated by a partnership controlled by Peter Malkin and the estate of the late Harry Helmsley. The lessees receive almost ninety million dollars a year from the building’s tenants but are required to pay the lessors (Trump’s partners) only about a million nine hundred thousand. Trump himself doesn’t share in these proceeds, and the leases don’t expire until 2076. Only if he can devise a way to break the leases will his “ownership” acquire any value. His strategy—suing the Malkin-Helmsley group for a hundred million dollars, alleging, among other things, that they’ve violated the leases by allowing the building to become a “rodent infested” commercial slum—has proved fruitless. In February, when an armed madman on the eighty-sixth-floor observation deck killed a sightseer and wounded six others before shooting himself, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Trump, ever vigilant, would exploit the tragedy, and he did not disappoint. “Leona Helmsley should be ashamed of herself,” he told the Post.
One day, when I was in Trump’s office, he took a phone call from an investment banker, an opaque conversation that, after he hung up, I asked him to elucidate.
“Whatever complicates the world more I do,” he said.
Come again?
“It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out.”
Case in point: The widely held perception is that Trump is the sole visionary and master builder of Riverside South, the mega-development planned for the former Penn Central Yards, on the West Side. Trump began pawing at the property in 1974, obtained a formal option in 1977, allowed it to lapse in 1979, and reëntered the picture in 1984, when Chase Manhattan lent him eighty-four million dollars for land-purchase and development expenses. In the years that followed, he trotted out several elephantine proposals, diverse and invariably overly dense residential and commercial mixtures. “Zoning for me is a life process,” Trump told me. “Zoning is something I have done and ultimately always get because people appreciate what I’m asking for and they know it’s going to be the highest quality.” In fact, the consensus among the West Side neighbors who studied Trump’s designs was that they did not appreciate what he was asking for. An exotically banal hundred-and-fifty-story phallus—“The World’s Tallest Building”—provided the centerpiece of his most vilified scheme.
The oddest passage in this byzantine history began in the late eighties, when an assortment of high-minded civic groups united to oppose Trump, enlisted their own architects, and drafted a greatly scaled-back alternative plan. The civic groups hoped to persuade Chase Manhattan, which held Trump’s mortgage, to help them entice a developer who could wrest the property from their nemesis. To their dismay, and sheepish amazement, they discovered that one developer was willing to pursue their design: Trump. Over time, the so-called “civic alternative” has become, in the public mind, thanks to Trump’s drumbeating, his proposal; he has appropriated conceptual ownership.
Three years ago, a syndicate of Asian investors, led by Henry Cheng, of Hong Kong’s New World Development Company, assumed the task of arranging construction financing. This transaction altered Trump’s involvement to a glorified form of sweat equity; for a fee paid by the investment syndicate, Trump Organization staff people would collaborate with a team from New World, monitoring the construction already under way and working on designs, zoning, and planning for the phases to come. Only when New World has recovered its investment, plus interest, will Trump begin to see any real profit—twenty-five years, at least, after he first cast his covetous eye at the Penn Central rail yards. According to Trump’s unaudited net-worth statement, which identifies Riverside South as “Trump Boulevard,” he “owns 30-50% of the project, depending on performance.” This “ownership,” however, is a potential profit share rather than actual equity. Six hundred million dollars is the value Trump imputes to this highly provisional asset.
Of course, the “comeback” Trump is much the same as the Trump of the eighties; there is no “new” Trump, just as there was never a “new” Nixon. Rather, all along there have been several Trumps: the hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit; the knowledgeable builder whose associates profess awe at his attention to detail; the narcissist whose self-absorption doesn’t account for his dead-on ability to exploit other people’s weaknesses; the perpetual seventeen-year-old who lives in a zero-sum world of winners and “total losers,” loyal friends and “complete scumbags”; the insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn’t like what he reads, attacks the messengers as “human garbage”; the chairman and largest stockholder of a billion-dollar public corporation who seems unable to resist heralding overly optimistic earnings projections, which then fail to materialize, thereby eroding the value of his investment—in sum, a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences.Advertisement
Trump’s most caustic detractors in New York real-estate circles disparage him as “a casino operator in New Jersey,” as if to say, “He’s not really even one of us.” Such derision is rooted in resentment that his rescue from oblivion—his strategy for remaining the marketable real-estate commodity “Trump”—hinged upon his ability to pump cash out of Atlantic City. The Trump image is nowhere more concentrated than in Atlantic City, and it is there, of late, that the Trump alchemy—transforming other people’s money into his own wealth—has been most strenuously tested.
To bail himself out with the banks, Trump converted his casinos to public ownership, despite the fact that the constraints inherent in answering to shareholders do not come to him naturally. Inside the Trump Organization, for instance, there is talk of “the Donald factor,” the three to five dollars per share that Wall Street presumably discounts Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts by allowing for his braggadocio and unpredictability. The initial public offering, in June, 1995, raised a hundred and forty million dollars, at fourteen dollars a share. Less than a year later, a secondary offering, at thirty-one dollars per share, brought in an additional three hundred and eighty million dollars. Trump’s personal stake in the company now stands at close to forty per cent. As chairman, Donald had an excellent year in 1996, drawing a million-dollar salary, another million for miscellaneous “services,” and a bonus of five million. As a shareholder, however, he did considerably less well. A year ago, the stock traded at thirty-five dollars; it now sells for around ten.
Notwithstanding Trump’s insistence that things have never been better, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts has to cope with several thorny liabilities, starting with a junk-bond debt load of a billion seven hundred million dollars. In 1996, the company’s losses amounted to three dollars and twenty-seven cents per share—attributable, in part, to extraordinary expenses but also to the fact that the Atlantic City gaming industry has all but stopped growing. And, most glaringly, there was the burden of the Trump Castle, which experienced a ten-per-cent revenue decline, the worst of any casino in Atlantic City.
Last October, the Castle, a heavily leveraged consistent money loser that had been wholly owned by Trump, was bought into Trump Hotels, a transaction that gave him five million eight hundred and thirty-seven thousand shares of stock. Within two weeks—helped along by a reduced earnings estimate from a leading analyst—the stock price, which had been eroding since the spring, began to slide more precipitously, triggering a shareholder lawsuit that accused Trump of self-dealing and a “gross breach of his fiduciary duties.” At which point he began looking for a partner. The deal Trump came up with called for Colony Capital, a sharp real-estate outfit from Los Angeles, to buy fifty-one per cent of the Castle for a price that seemed to vindicate the terms under which he’d unloaded it on the public company. Closer inspection revealed, however, that Colony’s capital injection would give it high-yield preferred, rather than common, stock—in other words, less an investment than a loan. Trump-l’oeil: Instead of trying to persuade the world that he owned something that wasn’t his, he was trying to convey the impression that he would part with an onerous asset that, as a practical matter, he would still be stuck with. In any event, in March the entire deal fell apart. Trump, in character, claimed that he, not Colony, had called it off.
The short-term attempt to solve the Castle’s problems is a four-million-dollar cosmetic overhaul. This so-called “re-theming” will culminate in June, when the casino acquires a new name: Trump Marina. One day this winter, I accompanied Trump when he buzzed into Atlantic City for a re-theming meeting with Nicholas Ribis, the president and chief executive officer of Trump Hotels, and several Castle executives. The discussion ranged from the size of the lettering on the outside of the building to the sparkling gray granite in the lobby to potential future renderings, including a version with an as yet unbuilt hotel tower and a permanently docked yacht to be called Miss Universe. Why the boat? “It’s just an attraction,” Trump said. “You understand, this would be part of a phase-two or phase-three expansion. It’s going to be the largest yacht in the world.”
From the re-theming meeting, we headed for the casino, and along the way Trump received warm salutations. A white-haired woman wearing a pink warmup suit and carrying a bucket of quarters said, “Mr. Trump, I just love you, darling.” He replied, “Thank you. I love you, too,” then turned to me and said, “You see, they’re good people. And I like people. You’ve gotta be nice. They’re like friends.”
The Castle had two thousand two hundred and thirty-nine slot machines, including, in a far corner, thirteen brand-new and slightly terrifying “Wheel of Fortune”-theme contraptions, which were about to be officially unveiled. On hand were representatives of International Game Technology (the machines’ manufacturer), a press entourage worthy of a military briefing in the wake of a Grenada-calibre invasion, and a couple of hundred onlookers—all drawn by the prospect of a personal appearance by Vanna White, the doyenne of “Wheel of Fortune.” Trump’s arrival generated satisfying expressions of awe from the rubberneckers, though not the spontaneous burst of applause that greeted Vanna, who had been conscripted for what was described as “the ceremonial first pull.”
When Trump spoke, he told the gathering, “This is the beginning of a new generation of machine.” Vanna pulled the crank, but the crush of reporters made it impossible to tell what was going on or even what denomination of currency had been sacrificed. The demographics of the crowd suggested that the most efficient machine would be one that permitted direct deposit of a Social Security check. After a delay that featured a digital musical cacophony, the machine spat back a few coins. Trump said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it took a little while. We hope it doesn’t take you as long. And we just want to thank you for being our friends.” And then we were out of there. “This is what we do. What can I tell you?” Trump said, as we made our way through the casino.
Vanna White was scheduled to join us for the helicopter flight back to New York, and later, as we swung over Long Island City, heading for a heliport on the East Side, Trump gave Vanna a little hug and, not for the first time, praised her star turn at the Castle. “For the opening of thirteen slot machines, I’d say we did all right today,” he said, and then they slapped high fives.
In a 1990 Playboy interview, Trump said that the yacht, the glitzy casinos, the gleaming bronze of Trump Tower were all “props for the show,” adding that “the show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.” In 1985, the show moved to Palm Beach. For ten million dollars, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago, a hundred-and-eighteen-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian castle built in the twenties by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton, set on seventeen and a half acres extending from the ocean to Lake Worth. Ever since, his meticulous restoration and literal regilding of the property have been a work in progress. The winter of 1995-96 was Mar-a-Lago’s first full season as a commercial venture, a private club with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar initiation fee (which later rose to fifty thousand and is now quoted at seventy-five thousand). The combination of the Post-Hutton pedigree and Trump’s stewardship offered a paradigm of how an aggressively enterprising devotion to Good Taste inevitably transmutes to Bad Taste—but might nevertheless pay for itself.Advertisement
Only Trump and certain of his minions know who among Mar-a-Lago’s more than three hundred listed members has actually forked over initiation fees and who’s paid how much for the privilege. Across the years, there have been routine leaks by a mysterious unnamed spokesman within the Trump Organization to the effect that this or that member of the British Royal Family was planning to buy a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower. It therefore came as no surprise when, during early recruiting efforts at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales, their mutual antipathy notwithstanding, had signed up. Was there any documentation? Well, um, Chuck and Di were honorary members. Among the honorary members who have yet to pass through Mar-a-Lago’s portals are Henry Kissinger and Elizabeth Taylor.
The most direct but not exactly most serene way to travel to Mar-a-Lago, I discovered one weekend not long ago, is aboard Trump’s 727, the same aircraft he gave up during the blip and, after an almost decent interval, bought back. My fellow-passengers included Eric Javits, a lawyer and nephew of the late Senator Jacob Javits, bumming a ride; Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late publishing tycoon and inadequate swimmer Robert Maxwell, also bumming a ride; Matthew Calamari, a telephone-booth-size bodyguard who is the head of security for the entire Trump Organization; and Eric Trump, Donald’s thirteen-year-old son.
The solid-gold fixtures and hardware (sinks, seat-belt clasps, door hinges, screws), well-stocked bar and larder, queen-size bed, and bidet (easily outfitted with a leather-cushioned cover in case of sudden turbulence) implied hedonistic possibilities—the plane often ferried high rollers to Atlantic City—but I witnessed only good clean fun. We hadn’t been airborne long when Trump decided to watch a movie. He’d brought along “Michael,” a recent release, but twenty minutes after popping it into the VCR he got bored and switched to an old favorite, a Jean Claude Van Damme slugfest called “Bloodsport,” which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie.” By assigning to his son the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition—Trump’s goal being “to get this two-hour movie down to forty-five minutes”—he eliminated any lulls between the nose hammering, kidney tenderizing, and shin whacking. When a beefy bad guy who was about to squish a normal-sized good guy received a crippling blow to the scrotum, I laughed. “Admit it, you’re laughing!” Trump shouted. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous Jean Claude Van Damme movie, but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it, too?”
A small convoy of limousines greeted us on the runway in Palm Beach, and during the ten-minute drive to Mar-a-Lago Trump waxed enthusiastic about a “spectacular, world-class” golf course he was planning to build on county-owned land directly opposite the airport. Trump, by the way, is a skilled golfer. A source extremely close to him—by which I mean off the record, but I can use it—told me that Claude Harmon, a former winner of the Masters tournament and for thirty-three years the club pro at Winged Foot, in Mamaroneck, New York, once described Donald as “the best weekend player” he’d ever seen.
The only formal event on Trump’s agenda had already got under way. Annually, the publisher of Forbes invites eleven corporate potentates to Florida, where they spend a couple of nights aboard the company yacht, the Highlander, and, during the day, adroitly palpate each other’s brains and size up each other’s short games. A supplementary group of capital-gains-tax skeptics had been invited to a Friday-night banquet in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. Trump arrived between the roast-duck appetizer and the roasted-portabello-mushroom salad and took his seat next to Malcolm S. (Steve) Forbes, Jr., the erstwhile Presidential candidate and the chief executive of Forbes, at a table that also included les grands fromages of Hertz, Merrill Lynch, the C.I.T. Group, and Countrywide Credit Industries. At an adjacent table, Marla Maples Trump, who had just returned from Shreveport, Louisiana, where she was rehearsing her role as co-host of the Miss U.S.A. pageant, discussed global politics and the sleeping habits of three-year-old Tiffany with the corporate chiefs and chief spouses of A.T. & T., Sprint, and Office Depot. During coffee, Donald assured everyone present that they were “very special” to him, that he wanted them to think of Mar-a-Lago as home, and that they were all welcome to drop by the spa the next day for a freebie.
Tony Senecal, a former mayor of Martinsburg, West Virginia, who now doubles as Trump’s butler and Mar-a-Lago’s resident historian, told me, “Some of the restoration work that’s being done here is so subtle it’s almost not Trump-like.” Subtlety, however, is not the dominant motif. Weary from handling Trump’s legal work, Jay Goldberg used to retreat with his wife to Mar-a-Lago for a week each year. Never mind the tapestries, murals, frescoes, winged statuary, life-size portrait of Trump (titled “The Visionary”), bathtub-size flower-filled samovars, vaulted Corinthian colonnade, thirty-four-foot ceilings, blinding chandeliers, marquetry, overstuffed and gold-leaf-stamped everything else, Goldberg told me; what nudged him around the bend was a small piece of fruit.
“We were surrounded by a staff of twenty people,” he said, “including a footman. I didn’t even know what that was. I thought maybe a chiropodist. Anyway, wherever I turned there was always a bowl of fresh fruit. So there I am, in our room, and I decide to step into the bathroom to take a leak. And on the way I grab a kumquat and eat it. Well, by the time I come out of the bathroom the kumquat has been replaced.
As for the Mar-a-Lago spa, aerobic exercise is an activity Trump indulges in “as little as possible,” and he’s therefore chosen not to micromanage its daily affairs. Instead, he brought in a Texas outfit called the Greenhouse Spa, proven specialists in mud wraps, manual lymphatic drainage, reflexology, shiatsu and Hawaiian hot-rock massage, loofah polishes, sea-salt rubs, aromatherapy, acupuncture, peat baths, and Japanese steeping-tub protocol. Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young female spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mar-a-Lago each season and has been designated an “artist-in-residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lea Southall”—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she’d trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”Advertisement
My visit happened to coincide with the coldest weather of the winter, and this gave me a convenient excuse, at frequent intervals, to retreat to my thousand-dollar-a-night suite and huddle under the bedcovers in fetal position. Which is where I was around ten-thirty Saturday night, when I got a call from Tony Senecal, summoning me to the ballroom. The furnishings had been altered since the Forbes banquet the previous evening. Now there was just a row of armchairs in the center of the room and a couple of low tables, an arrangement that meant Donald and Marla were getting ready for a late dinner in front of the TV. They’d already been out to a movie with Eric and Tiffany and some friends and bodyguards, and now a theatre-size screen had descended from the ceiling so that they could watch a pay-per-view telecast of a junior-welterweight-championship boxing match between Oscar de la Hoya and Miguel Angel Gonzalez.
Marla was eating something green, while Donald had ordered his favorite, meat loaf and mashed potatoes. “We have a chef who makes the greatest meat loaf in the world,” he said. “It’s so great I told him to put it on the menu. So whenever we have it, half the people order it. But then afterward, if you ask them what they ate, they always deny it.”
Trump is not only a boxing fan but an occasional promoter, and big bouts are regularly staged at his hotels in Atlantic City. Whenever he shows up in person, he drops by to wish the fighters luck beforehand and is always accorded a warm welcome, with the exception of a chilly reception not long ago from the idiosyncratic Polish head-butter and rabbit-puncher Andrew Golota. This was just before Golota went out and pounded Riddick Bowe into retirement, only to get himself disqualified for a series of low blows that would’ve been perfectly legal in “Bloodsport.”
“Golota’s a killer,” Trump said admiringly. “A stone-cold killer.”
When I asked Marla how she felt about boxing, she said, “I enjoy it a lot, just as long as nobody gets hurt.”
When a call came a while back from Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed, the retired general, amateur boxer, and restless pretender to the Presidency of Russia, explaining that he was headed to New York and wanted to arrange a meeting, Trump was pleased but not surprised. The list of superpower leaders and geopolitical strategists with whom Trump has engaged in frank and fruitful exchanges of viewpoints includes Mikhail Gorbachev, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. (He’s also pals with Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood, men’s men who enjoy international reputations for racking up massive body counts.) In 1987, fresh from his grandest public-relations coup—repairing in three and a half months, under budget and for no fee, the Wollman skating rink, in Central Park, a job that the city of New York had spent six years and twelve million dollars bungling—Trump contemplated how, in a larger sphere, he could advertise himself as a doer and dealmaker. One stunt involved orchestrating an “invitation” from the federal government to examine the Williamsburg Bridge, which was falling apart. Trump had no real interest in the job, but by putting on a hard hat and taking a stroll on the bridge for the cameras he stoked the fantasy that he could rebuild the city’s entire infrastructure. From there it was only a short leap to saving the planet. What if, say, a troublemaker like Muammar Qaddafi got his hands on a nuclear arsenal? Well, Trump declared, he stood ready to work with the leaders of the then Soviet Union to coördinate a formula for coping with Armageddon-minded lunatics.
The clear purpose of Lebed’s trip to America, an unofficial visit that coincided with the second Clinton Inaugural, was to add some reassuring human texture to his image as a plainspoken tough guy. Simultaneously, his domestic political prospects could be enhanced if voters back home got the message that Western capitalists felt comfortable with him. Somewhere in Lebed’s calculations was the understanding that, to the nouveau entrepreneurs of the freebooter’s paradise that is now Russia, Trump looked and smelled like very old money.
Their rendezvous was scheduled for midmorning. Having enlisted as an interpreter Inga Bogutska, a receptionist whose father, by coincidence, was a Russian general, Trump decided to greet his visitor in the lobby. When it turned out that Lebed, en route from an audience with a group of Times editors and reporters, was running late, Trump occupied himself by practicing his golf swing and surveying the female pedestrians in the atrium. Finally, Lebed arrived, a middle-aged but ageless fellow with a weathered, fleshy face and hooded eyes, wearing a gray business suit and an impassive expression. After posing for a Times photographer, they rode an elevator to the twenty-sixth floor, and along the way Trump asked, “So, how is everything in New York?”
“Well, it’s hard to give an assessment, but I think it is brilliant,” Lebed replied. He had a deep, bullfroggy voice, and his entourage of a half-dozen men included an interpreter, who rendered Inga Bogutska superfluous.
“Yes, it’s been doing very well,” Trump agreed. “New York is on a very strong up. And we’ve been reading a lot of great things about this gentleman and his country.”
Inside his office, Trump immediately began sharing with Lebed some of his treasured possessions. “This is a shoe that was given to me by Shaquille O’Neal,” he said. “Basketball. Shaquille O’Neal. Seven feet three inches, I guess. This is his sneaker, the actual sneaker. In fact, he gave this to me after a game.”
“I’ve always said,” Lebed sagely observed, “that after size 45, which I wear, then you start wearing trunks on your feet.”
“That’s true,” said Trump. He moved on to a replica of a Mike Tyson heavyweight-championship belt, followed by an Evander Holyfield glove. “He gave me this on my fiftieth birthday. And then he beat Tyson. I didn’t know who to root for. And then, again, here is Shaquille O’Neal’s shirt. Here, you might want to see this. This was part of an advertisement for Versace, the fashion designer. These are photographs of Madonna on the stairs at Mar-a-Lago, my house in Florida. And this photograph shows something that we just finished and are very proud of. It’s a big hotel called Trump International. And it’s been very successful. So we’ve had a lot of fun.”
Trump introduced Lebed to Howard Lorber, who had accompanied him a few months earlier on his journey to Moscow, where they looked at properties to which the Trump moniker might be appended. “Howard has major investments in Russia,” he told Lebed, but when Lorber itemized various ventures none seemed to ring a bell.
“See, they don’t know you,” Trump told Lorber. “With all that investment, they don’t know you. Trump they know.”
Some “poisonous people” at the Times, Lebed informed Trump, were “spreading some funny rumors that you are going to cram Moscow with casinos.”
Laughing, Trump said, “Is that right?”Advertisement
“I told them that I know you build skyscrapers in New York. High-quality skyscrapers.”
“We are actually looking at something in Moscow right now, and it would be skyscrapers and hotels, not casinos. Only quality stuff. But thank you for defending me. I’ll soon be going again to Moscow. We’re looking at the Moskva Hotel. We’re also looking at the Rossiya. That’s a very big project; I think it’s the largest hotel in the world. And we’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”
Lebed: “You must be a very confident person. You are building straight into the center.”
Trump: “I always go into the center.”
Lebed: “I hope I’m not offending by saying this, but I think you are a litmus testing paper. You are at the end of the edge. If Trump goes to Moscow, I think America will follow. So I consider these projects of yours to be very important. And I’d like to help you as best I can in putting your projects into life. I want to create a canal or riverbed for capital flow. I want to minimize the risks and get rid of situations where the entrepreneur has to try to hide his head between his shoulders. I told the New York Times I was talking to you because you are a professional—a high-level professional—and if you invest, you invest in real stuff. Serious, high-quality projects. And you deal with serious people. And I deem you to be a very serious person. That’s why I’m meeting you.”
Trump: “Well, that’s very nice. Thank you very much. I have something for you. This is a little token of my respect. I hope you like it. This is a book called ‘The Art of the Deal,’ which a lot of people have read. And if you read this book you’ll know the art of the deal better than I do.”
The conversation turned to Lebed’s lunch arrangements and travel logistics—“It’s very tiring to meet so many people,” he confessed—and the dialogue began to feel stilted, as if Trump’s limitations as a Kremlinologist had exhausted the potential topics. There was, however, one more subject he wanted to cover.
“Now, you were a boxer, right?” he said. “We have a lot of big matches at my hotels. We just had a match between Riddick Bowe and Andrew Golota, from Poland, who won the fight but was disqualified. He’s actually a great fighter if he can ever get through a match without being disqualified. And, to me, you look tougher than Andrew Golota.”
In response, Lebed pressed an index finger to his nose, or what was left of it, and flattened it against his face.
“You do look seriously tough,” Trump continued. “Were you an Olympic boxer?”
“No, I had a rather modest career.”
“Really? The newspapers said you had a great career.”
“At a certain point, my company leader put the question straight: either you do the sports or you do the military service. And I selected the military.”
“You made the right decision,” Trump agreed, as if putting to rest any notion he might have entertained about promoting a Lebed exhibition bout in Atlantic City.
Norma Foerderer came in with a camera to snap a few shots for the Trump archives and to congratulate the general for his fancy footwork in Chechnya. Phone numbers were exchanged, and Lebed, before departing, offered Trump a benediction: “You leave on the earth a very good trace for centuries. We’re all mortal, but the things you build will stay forever. You’ve already proven wrong the assertion that the higher the attic, the more trash there is.”
When Trump returned from escorting Lebed to the elevator, I asked him his impressions.
“First of all, you wouldn’t want to play nuclear weapons with this fucker,” he said. “Does he look as tough and cold as you’ve ever seen? This is not like your average real-estate guy who’s rough and mean. This guy’s beyond that. You see it in the eyes. This guy is a killer. How about when I asked, ‘Were you a boxer?’ Whoa—that nose is a piece of rubber. But me he liked. When we went out to the elevator, he was grabbing me, holding me, he felt very good. And he liked what I do. You know what? I think I did a good job for the country today.”
The phone rang—Jesse Jackson calling about some office space Trump had promised to help the Rainbow Coalition lease at 40 Wall Street. (“Hello, Jesse. How ya doin’? You were on Rosie’s show? She’s terrific, right? Yeah, I think she is. . . . Okay-y-y, how are you?”) Trump hung up, sat forward, his eyebrows arched, smiling a smile that contained equal measures of surprise and self-satisfaction. “You gotta say, I cover the gamut. Does the kid cover the gamut? Boy, it never ends. I mean, people have no idea. Cool life. You know, it’s sort of a cool life.”
One Saturday this winter, Trump and I had an appointment at Trump Tower. After I’d waited ten minutes, the concierge directed me to the penthouse. When I emerged from the elevator, there Donald stood, wearing a black cashmere topcoat, navy suit, blue-and-white pin-striped shirt, and maroon necktie. “I thought you might like to see my apartment,” he said, and as I squinted against the glare of gilt and mirrors in the entrance corridor he added, “I don’t really do this.” That we both knew this to be a transparent fib—photo spreads of the fifty-three-room triplex and its rooftop park had appeared in several magazines, and it had been featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”—in no way undermined my enjoyment of the visual and aural assault that followed: the twenty-nine-foot-high living room with its erupting fountain and vaulted ceiling decorated with neo-Romantic frescoes; the two-story dining room with its carved ivory frieze (“I admit that the ivory’s kind of a no-no”); the onyx columns with marble capitals that had come from “a castle in Italy”; the chandelier that originally hung in “a castle in Austria”; the African blue-onyx lavatory. As we admired the view of Central Park, to the north, he said, “This is the greatest apartment ever built. There’s never been anything like it. There’s no apartment like this anywhere. It was harder to build this apartment than the rest of the building. A lot of it I did just to see if it could be done. All the very wealthy people who think they know great apartments come here and they say, ‘Donald, forget it. This is the greatest.’ ” Very few touches suggested that real people actually lived there—where was it, exactly, that Trump sat around in his boxers, eating roast-beef sandwiches, channel surfing, and scratching where it itched? Where was it that Marla threw her jogging clothes?—but no matter. “Come here, I’ll show you how life works,” he said, and we turned a couple of corners and wound up in a sitting room that had a Renoir on one wall and a view that extended beyond the Statue of Liberty. “My apartments that face the Park go for twice as much as the apartments that face south. But I consider this view to be more beautiful than that view, especially at night. As a cityscape, it can’t be beat.”Advertisement
We then drove down to 40 Wall Street, where members of a German television crew were waiting for Trump to show them around. (“This will be the finest office building anywhere in New York. Not just downtown—anywhere in New York.”) Along the way, we stopped for a light at Forty-second Street and First Avenue. The driver of a panel truck in the next lane began waving, then rolled down his window and burbled, “I never see you in person!” He was fortyish, wore a blue watch cap, and spoke with a Hispanic inflection. “But I see you a lot on TV.”
“Good,” said Trump. “Thank you. I think.”
“Where’s Marla?”
“She’s in Louisiana, getting ready to host the Miss U.S.A. pageant. You better watch it. O.K.?”
“O.K., I promise,” said the man in the truck. “Have a nice day, Mr. Trump. And have a profitable day.”
“Always.”
Later, Trump said to me, “You want to know what total recognition is? I’ll tell you how you know you’ve got it. When the Nigerians on the street corners who don’t speak a word of English, who have no clue, who’re selling watches for some guy in New Jersey—when you walk by and those guys say, ‘Trump! Trump!’ That’s total recognition.”
Next, we headed north, to Mount Kisco, in Westchester County—specifically to Seven Springs, a fifty-five-room limestone-and-granite Georgian splendor completed in 1917 by Eugene Meyer, the father of Katharine Graham. If things proceeded according to plan, within a year and a half the house would become the centerpiece of the Trump Mansion at Seven Springs, a golf club where anyone willing to part with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars could tee up. As we approached, Trump made certain I paid attention to the walls lining the driveway. “Look at the quality of this granite. Because I’m like, you know, into quality. Look at the quality of that wall. Hand-carved granite, and the same with the house.” Entering a room where two men were replastering a ceiling, Trump exulted, “We’ve got the pros here! You don’t see too many plasterers anymore. I take a union plasterer from New York and bring him up here. You know why? Because he’s the best.” We canvassed the upper floors and then the basement, where Trump sized up the bowling alley as a potential spa. “This is very much Mar-a-Lago all over again,” he said. “A great building, great land, great location. Then the question is what to do with it.”
From the rear terrace, Trump mapped out some holes of the golf course: an elevated tee above a par three, across a ravine filled with laurel and dogwood; a couple of parallel par fours above the slope that led to a reservoir. Then he turned to me and said, “I bought this whole thing for seven and a half million dollars. People ask, ‘How’d you do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Does that make sense?” Not really, nor did his next utterance: “You know, nobody’s ever seen a granite house before.”
Granite? Nobody? Never? In the history of humankind? Impressive.
A few months ago, Marla Maples Trump, with a straight face, told an interviewer about life with hubby: “He really has the desire to have me be more of the traditional wife. He definitely wants his dinner promptly served at seven. And if he’s home at six-thirty it should be ready by six-thirty.” Oh well, so much for that.
In Trump’s office the other morning, I asked whether, in light of his domestic shuffle, he planned to change his living arrangements. He smiled for the first time that day and said, “Where am I going to live? That might be the most difficult question you’ve asked so far. I want to finish the work on my apartment at Trump International. That should take a few months, maybe two, maybe six. And then I think I’ll live there for maybe six months. Let’s just say, for a period of time. The buildings always work better when I’m living there.”
What about the Trump Tower apartment? Would that sit empty?
“Well, I wouldn’t sell that. And, of course, there’s no one who would ever build an apartment like that. The penthouse at Trump International isn’t nearly as big. It’s maybe seven thousand square feet. But it’s got a living room that is the most spectacular residential room in New York. A twenty-five-foot ceiling. I’m telling you, the best room anywhere. Do you understand?”
I think I did: the only apartment with a better view than the best apartment in the world was the same apartment. Except for the one across the Park, which had the most spectacular living room in the world. No one had ever seen a granite house before. And, most important, every square inch belonged to Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. “Trump”—a fellow with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience, a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone. ♦Published by The New Yorker in the print edition of the May 19, 1997, issue.
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“Miley Cyrus’ 16th birthday party was more boisterous than sweet”, recounts Associated Press quoted by Hollywood Reporter, in 2008
Cyrus celebrated the hallmark birthday at an over-the-top Disneyland celebration Sunday — even though she doesn’t actually turn 16 until Nov. 23. The theme park was closed for the supersized soiree, which included a four-song performance by the teen queen and a fireworks display above Sleeping Beauty Castle and 16 giant inflatable candles.
“Miley is really hard to surprise,” her father Billy Ray Cyrus said at the event. Organizers estimated over 5,000 people attended the special party, which cost $250 a ticket. On the event’s purple carpet — that’s Cyrus’ favorite color — the “Hannah Montana” star bragged that her parents bought her a new puppy for her birthday. What else does Cyrus want for her birthday? A new car? Perhaps a later curfew?
“My parents shut down Disneyland for me, so I’m good for a while,” Cyrus said. Cyrus’ father opened up for his daughter with a few of his own songs, including “Achy Breaky Heart.” His daughter donned a white ruffled skirt and jersey-like vest with “Sweet 16” printed on the back for her truncated concert. At one point, Cyrus boarded a boat in the park’s Rivers of America and crooned such tunes as “Breakout” and “G.N.O.”
Throughout the evening, several popular attractions, such as Big Thunder Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean, remained open to partygoers. Additional activities, like receiving a “Hannah Montana” makeover and playing the upcoming Disney Interactive Studios rhythm video game “Ultimate Band,” were also made available to attendees.
Partygoers ogled celebrities roaming around the park throughout the party. David Archuleta and his entourage skipped the line to ride Space Mountain. Jennie Garth and her family ducked out before the fireworks display capping the celebration. Other stars in attendance included Steve Carell, Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Disney used the event to promote their upcoming “What Will You Celebrate?” marketing initiative, which encourages tourists to take “celebration vacations” with their families. Beginning in 2009, guests at Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida can gain free theme park admission on their birthday with a valid ID and proof of birth date.
Over at Disney’s California Adventure, Disneyland’s sister theme park, an entirely different celebration was occurring during the Sweet 16 event: the 11th annual Gay Days Anaheim, an unofficial gathering of gays and lesbians at the Disneyland Resort. Event producer Jeffrey Epstein said Cyrus’ affair didn’t conflict with Gay Days Anaheim.
We’re happy to share our big weekend with Miley. While it may be a small world after all, we think it’s big enough for both groups to have a blast.
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On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.
It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush.
Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44, a U.S. special envoy to North Korea and corporate lawyer, the meeting was critical.
His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement— essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them.
“I don’t think anyone has been told the truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did,’’ said one of Epstein’s victims, Michelle Licata, now 30. “He ruined my life and a lot of girls’ lives. People need to know what he did and why he wasn’t prosecuted so it never happens again.”
Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Until he was reported to be eliminated on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, Acosta also had been included on lists of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.
Acosta did not respond to numerous requests for an interview or answer queries through email.
But court records reveal details of the negotiations and the role that Acosta would play in arranging the deal, which scuttled the federal probe into a possible international sex trafficking operation. Among other things, Acosta allowed Epstein’s lawyers unusual freedoms in dictating the terms of the non-prosecution agreement.
“The damage that happened in this case is unconscionable,” said Bradley Edwards, a former state prosecutor who represents some of Epstein’s victims. “How in the world, do you, the U.S. attorney, engage in a negotiation with a criminal defendant, basically allowing that criminal defendant to write up the agreement?”
As a result, neither the victims — nor even the judge — would know how many girls Epstein allegedly sexually abused between 2001 and 2005, when his underage sex activities were first uncovered by police. Police referred the case to the FBI a year later, when they began to suspect that their investigation was being undermined by the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office.
NOT A ‘HE SAID, SHE SAID’
“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.
More than a decade later, at a time when Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood actresses have become a catalyst for a cultural reckoning about sexual abuse, Epstein’s victims have all but been forgotten.
The women — now in their late 20s and early 30s — are still fighting for an elusive justice that even the passage of time has not made right.
Like other victims of sexual abuse, they believe they’ve been silenced by a criminal justice system that stubbornly fails to hold Epstein and other wealthy and powerful men accountable.
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein.
Over the past year, the Miami Herald examined a decade’s worth of court documents, lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents. Key people involved in the investigation — most of whom have never spoken before — were also interviewed. The Herald also obtained new records, including the full unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation and witness statements that had been kept under seal.
The Herald learned that, as part of the plea deal, Epstein provided what the government called “valuable consideration” for unspecified information he supplied to federal investigators. While the documents obtained by the Herald don’t detail what the information was, Epstein’s sex crime case happened just as the country’s subprime mortgage market collapsed, ushering in the 2008 global financial crisis.
Records show that Epstein was a key federal witness in the criminal prosecution of two prominent executives with Bear Stearns, the global investment brokerage that failed in 2008, who were accused of corporate securities fraud. Epstein was one of the largest investors in the hedge fund managed by the executives, who were later acquitted. It is not known what role, if any, the case played in Epstein’s plea negotiations.
The Herald also identified about 80 women who say they were molested or otherwise sexually abused by Epstein from 2001 to 2006. About 60 of them were located — now scattered around the country and abroad. Eight of them agreed to be interviewed, on or off the record. Four of them were willing to speak on video.
The women are now mothers, wives, nurses, bartenders, Realtors, hairdressers and teachers. One is a Hollywood actress. Several have grappled with trauma, depression and addiction. Some have served time in prison.
A few did not survive. One young woman was found dead last year in a rundown motel in West Palm Beach. She overdosed on heroin and left behind a young son.
As part of Epstein’s agreement, he was required to register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the three dozen victims identified by the FBI. In many cases, the confidential financial settlements came only after Epstein’s attorneys exposed every dark corner of their lives in a scorched-earth effort to portray the girls as gold diggers.
“You beat yourself up mentally and physically,’’ said Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, who said Epstein molested her when she was 14. “You can’t ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something. For me, it is the word ‘pure’ because he called me ‘pure’ in that room and then I remember what he did to me in that room.’’
Now, more than a decade later, two unrelated civil lawsuits — one set for trial on Dec. 4 — could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. The Dec. 4 case, in Palm Beach County state court, involves Epstein and Edwards, whom Epstein had accused of legal misdeeds in representing several victims. The case is noteworthy because it will mark the first time that Epstein’s victims will have their day in court, and several of them are scheduled to testify.
A second lawsuit, known as the federal Crime Victims’ Rights suit, is still pending in South Florida after a decade of legal jousting. It seeks to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement in hopes of sending Epstein to federal prison. Wild, who has never spoken publicly until now, is Jane Doe No. 1 in “Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2 vs. the United States of America,” a federal lawsuit that alleges Epstein’s federal non-prosecution agreement was illegal.
Federal prosecutors, including Acosta, not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.
“As soon as that deal was signed, they silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’ said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’
In court papers, federal prosecutors have argued that they did not violate the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because no federal charges were ever filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, an argument that was later dismissed by the judge.Play VideoDuration 0:00Virginia Roberts was working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited to be a masseuse to Palm Beach hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein. She was lured into a life of depravity and sexual abuse.
Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.
“She was taken advantage of twice — first by Epstein, and then by the criminal justice system that labeled a 14-year-old girl as a prostitute,’’ said Spencer Kuvin, the lawyer who represented the girl.
“It’s just outrageous how they minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’ said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women.
“There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.
It would be easy to dismiss the Epstein case as another example of how there are two systems of justice in America, one for the rich and one for the poor. But a thorough analysis of the case tells a far more troubling story.
A close look at the trove of letters and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent court documents, admitted was unorthodox.
Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.
‘AVOID THE PRESS’ PLAN
That included keeping the deal from Epstein’s victims, emails show.
“Thank you for the commitment you made to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,’’ Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after their breakfast meeting in West Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential.
“You … assured me that your office would not … contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or potential civil claimants and the respective counsel in this matter,’’ Lefkowitz wrote.
In email after email, Acosta and the lead federal prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, acquiesced to Epstein’s legal team’s demands, which often focused on ways to limit the scandal by shutting out his victims and the media, including suggesting that the charges be filed in Miami, instead of Palm Beach, where Epstein’s victims lived.
“On an ‘avoid the press’ note … I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’ Villafaña wrote to Lefkowitz in a September 2007 email.
Federal prosecutors identified 36 underage victims, but none of those victims appeared at his sentencing on June 30, 2008, in state court in Palm Beach County. Most of them heard about it on the news — and even then they didn’t understand what had happened to the federal probe that they’d been assured was ongoing.
Edwards filed an emergency motion in federal court to block the non-prosecution agreement, but by the time the agreement was unsealed — over a year later — Epstein had already served his sentence and been released from jail.
“The conspiracy between the government and Epstein was really ‘let’s figure out a way to make the whole thing go away as quietly as possible,’ ’’ said Edwards, who represents Wild and Jane Doe No. 2, who declined to comment for this story.
“In never consulting with the victims, and keeping it secret, it showed that someone with money can buy his way out of anything.’’
It was far from the last time Epstein would receive VIP handling. Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.
The sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, would not answer questions, submitted by the Miami Herald, about Epstein’s work release.
Neither Epstein nor his lead attorney, Jack Goldberger, responded to multiple requests for comment for this story. During depositions taken as part of two dozen lawsuits filed against him by his victims, Epstein has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, in one instance doing so more than 200 times.
In the past, his lawyers have said that the girls lied about their ages, that their stories were exaggerated or untrue and that they were unreliable witnesses prone to drug use.
In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender — the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.
A prosecutor under New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case. Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender accused of molesting so many girls.
“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward argument like this,’’ she said.
THE HOUSE ON EL BRILLO
The women who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion as girls tend to divide their lives into two parts: life before Jeffrey and life after Jeffrey.
Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an A-student at Lake Worth Middle School.
After she met Epstein, she was a stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in Florida’s Panhandle.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.
She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. Wild, who later helped recruit other girls, said Epstein preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further each time.
“By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in my life for years,” said Wild, who was released from prison in October after serving three years on drug charges.
The girls — mostly 13 to 16 — were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man — Epstein — a massage, according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the Herald.
The lead Palm Beach police detective on the case, Joseph Recarey, said Epstein’s operation worked like a sexual pyramid scheme.
“The common interview with a girl went like this: ‘I was brought there by so and so. I didn’t feel comfortable with what happened, but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn’t feel comfortable, I could bring someone else and still get paid,’ ’’ Recarey said.
During the massage sessions, Recarey said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls.
Recarey, in his first interview about the case, said the evidence the department collected to support the girls’ stories was overwhelming, including phone call records, copies of written phone messages from the girls found in Epstein’s trash and Epstein’s flight logs, which showed his private plane in Palm Beach on the days the girls were scheduled to give him massages.
Epstein could be a generous benefactor, Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young girl to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after one of his girls starred in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for one of the girls were discovered in a search of his mansion and trash. Police also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.
Epstein counseled the girls about their schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school, fashion design or acting. At least two of Epstein’s victims told police that they were in love with him, according to the police report.
The police report shows how uncannily consistent the girls’ stories were — right down to their detailed descriptions of Epstein’s genitalia.
“We had victims who didn’t know each other, never met each other and they all basically independently told the same story,’’ said Reiter, the retired Palm Beach police chief.
Reiter, also speaking for the first time, said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of young girls coming and going from his house, the frequency — sometimes several in the same day — and the young ages of the girls.
“It started out to give a man a back rub, but in many cases it turned into something far worse than that, elevated to a serious crime, in some cases sexual batteries,’’ he said.
Most of the girls said they arrived by car or taxi, and entered the side door, where they were led into a kitchen by a female staff assistant named Sarah Kellen, the report said. A chef might prepare them a meal or offer them cereal. The girls — most from local schools — would then ascend a staircase off the kitchen, up to a large master bedroom and bath.
They were met by Epstein, clad in a towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie facedown on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully, and direct them to massage his feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples, while he masturbated, according to the police report.
At times, if emboldened, he would try to penetrate them with his fingers or use a vibrator on them. He would go as far as the girls were willing to let him, including intercourse, according to police documents. Sometimes he would instruct a young woman he described as his Yugoslavian sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova, who was over 18, to join in, the girls told Recarey. Epstein often took photographs of the girls having sex and displayed them around the house, the detective said.
Once sexually gratified, Epstein would take a shower in his massive bathroom, which the girls described as having a large shower and a hot pink and mint green sofa.
Kellen (now Vickers) and Marcinkova, through their attorneys, declined to comment for this story.
NEVER ENOUGH
One girl told police that she was approached by an Epstein recruiter when she was 16, and was working at the Wellington mall. Over the course of more than a year, she went to Epstein’s house hundreds of times, she said. The girl tearfully told Recarey that she often had sex with Marcinkova — who employed strap-on dildos and other toys — while Epstein watched and choreographed her moves to please himself, according to the police report. Often times, she said, she was so sore after the encounters that she could barely walk, the police report said.
But she said she was firm about not wanting to have intercourse with Epstein. One day, however, the girl said that Epstein, unable to control himself, held her down on a massage table and penetrated her, the police report said. The girl, who was 16 or 17 at the time, said that Epstein apologized and paid her $1,000, the police report said.
Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her 8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald.
Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness.
“We were stupid, poor children,’’ said one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about Epstein. At the time, she said, she was 14 and a high school freshman.
“We just wanted money for school clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there. The girls who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein and the cops who championed their cause remain angry over what they regard as a gross injustice, while Epstein’s employees and those who engineered his non-prosecution agreement have prospered.
The woman, who went to Epstein’s home multiple times, said Epstein didn’t like her because her breasts were too big. The last time she went, she said, one girl came out crying and they were instructed to leave the house and had to pay for their own cab home.
Some girls told police they were coached by their peer recruiters to lie to Epstein about their ages and say they were 18. Epstein’s legal team would later claim that even if the girls were under 18, there was no way he could have known. However, under Florida law, ignorance of a sex partner’s age is not a defense for having sex with a minor.
Wild said he was well aware of their tender ages — because he demanded they be young.
“He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them,’’ she said, explaining that as she grew older and had less access to young girls, Epstein got increasingly angry with her inability to find him the young girls he desired.
“If I had a girl to bring him at breakfast, lunch and dinner, then that’s how many times I would go a day. He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough.’’
THE PYRAMID CRUMBLES
Epstein’s scheme first began to unravel in March 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Palm Beach police that she had been molested by Epstein at his mansion. The girl reluctantly confessed that she had been brought there by two other girls, and those girls pointed to two more girls who had been there.
By the time detectives tracked down one victim, there were two and three more to find. Soon there were dozens.
“We didn’t know where the victims would ever end,” Reiter said.
Eventually, the girls told them about still other girls and young women they had seen at Epstein’s house, many of whom didn’t speak English, Recarey said. That led Recarey to suspect that Epstein’s exploits weren’t just confined to Palm Beach. Police obtained the flight logs for his private plane, and found female names and initials among the list of people who flew on the aircraft — including the names of some famous and powerful people who had also been passengers, Recarey said.
A newly released FBI report shows that at the time the non-prosecution deal was executed, the agency was interviewing witnesses and victims “from across the United States.” The probe stretched from Florida to New York and New Mexico, records show. The report was released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by Radar Online and was made available on the bureau’s website after the Miami Herald and other news organizations submitted requests, said Daniel Novack, the lawyer who filed the Freedom of Information Act case pro bono.
One lawsuit, still pending in New York, alleges that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil. The girls lived in a New York building owned by Epstein, who paid for their visas, according to the sworn statement of Maritza Vasquez, the one-time bookkeeper for Mc2, the modeling agency.
Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he said.
“The day that a sitting U.S. attorney is afraid of a lawyer or afraid of a defendant is a very sad day in this country,’’ said Fisten, now a private investigator for Edwards.
SUIT/COUNTERSUIT
Now, a complex web of litigation could reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. A lawsuit, set for trial Dec. 4 in Palm Beach County, involves the notorious convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein, in whose law firm Edwards once worked.
In 2009, Epstein sued Edwards, alleging that Edwards was involved with Rothstein and was using the girls’ civil lawsuits to perpetuate Rothstein’s massive Ponzi operation. But Rothstein said Edwards didn’t know about the scheme, and Epstein dropped the lawsuit.
Edwards countersued for malicious prosecution, arguing that Epstein sued him to retaliate for his aggressive representation of Epstein’s victims.
Several women who went to Epstein’s home as underage girls are scheduled to testify against him for the first time.
Florida state Sen. Lauren Book, a child sex abuse survivor who has lobbied for tough sex offender laws, said Epstein’s case should serve as a tipping point for criminal cases involving sex crimes against children.
“Where is the righteous indignation for these women? Where are the protectors? Who is banging down the doors of the secretary of labor, or the judge or the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach County, demanding justice and demanding the right to be heard?’’ Book asked.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Villafaña, in court papers, said that prosecutors used their “best efforts’’ to comply with the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but exercised their “prosecutorial discretion’’ when they chose not to notify the victims. The reasoning went like this: The non-prosecution deal had a restitution clause that provided the girls a chance to seek compensation from Epstein. Had the deal fallen through, necessitating a trial, Epstein’s lawyers might have used the prior restitution clause to undermine the girls’ credibility as witnesses, by claiming they had exaggerated Epstein’s behavior in hopes of cashing in.
Acosta has never fully explained why he felt it was in the best interests of the underage girls — and their parents — for him to keep the agreement sealed. Or why the FBI investigation was closed even as, recently released documents show, the case was yielding more victims and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy beyond Palm Beach.
Upon his nomination by Trump as labor secretary in 2017, Acosta was questioned about the Epstein case during a Senate confirmation hearing.
“At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decided that a plea that guarantees someone goes to jail, that guarantees he register [as a sex offender] generally and guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing,’’ Acosta said of his decision to not prosecute Epstein federally.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in opposing Acosta for labor secretary, noted that “his handling of a case involving sex trafficking of underage girls when he was a U.S. attorney suggests he won’t put the interests of workers and everyday people ahead of the powerful and well-connected.’’
Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is one of the nation’s leading advocates for reforming laws involving sex crimes against children, said what Acosta and other prosecutors did is similar to what the Catholic Church did to protect pedophile priests.
“The real crime with the Catholic priests was the way they covered it up and shielded the priests,’’ Hamilton said. “The orchestration of power by men only is protected as long as everybody agrees to keep it secret. This is a story the world needs to hear.’’ – Miami Herald
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