February 24, 2019
The news of the last few days has ricocheted from one rage inducing story to the next that demonstrates just how little regard this country has for women and girls. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra issued a decision finding that federal prosecutors violated the rights of the victims of pedophile sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, (Source: “Jeffrey Epstein’s deal with federal prosecutors wasn’t normal. The men who arranged it need to face the music,” by Mimi Rocah and Berit Berger, NBCNews.com, 2/23/19). As Miami Herald journalist, Julie K.Brown, details in her award winning series, “Perversion of Justice,” Epstein was a truly revolting predator who ran a sex trafficking ring involving as many as 42 underage girls, some as young as 14.
Once caught, Epstein used his wealth and network of influential friends to hire a phalanx of high powered lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, to enable him to avoid the decades’ long prison sentence that his depravity deserved. Despite the fact that Epstein was charged with, not only luring underaged girls to his home to be repeatedly raped by him, but with “trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean,” Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta, who was then the U.S. Attorney, negotiated a Non-Prosecution Agreement that shut down the FBI investigation, allowed Epstein to plead guilty to two state prostitution charges and to serve a mere 13 months in a county jail, (Source: “Perversion of Justice: How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,” by Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald, 11/28/18). Continue reading “Trigger warning”