Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Joseph Abruzzo, who tried for three years to get permission to access and release the records, said the public and the victims have the right to know how the criminal case unfolded.
“We felt this was such an extraordinary case, and of such public interest, that we changed the law for this case,” Abruzzo said. “The public, and the victims specifically, want to know how he was able to get a slap on the wrist and go on for decades, continuing these heinous acts to hundreds, or more, underage girls or women.”
Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution and was sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2008. But he was given a lenient work-release deal, which allowed his chauffeur to take him to his West Palm Beach office every day, and eventually to his own home, while still officially in the custody of the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office.
Many of his victims said his wealth and connections led the state attorney in Palm Beach County, as well as the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, to treat him with deference. Epstein was connected to powerful people across the world, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Former Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta, who later became Donald Trump’s labor secretary, approved a secret agreement in which Epstein pleaded guilty to lesser state charges rather than face federal prosecution.
Epstein had to register as a sex offender, but suffered no other legal consequences for years, despite lawsuits from multiple women who said he had abused them when they were minors.
After a Miami Herald investigation in 2018 revisited how the case was handled in Florida, Epstein was taken into custody in New York in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy. He was accused of abusing dozens of girls at his Manhattan and Palm Beach homes and creating a network in which he paid his victims to bring him others.
On Aug. 10, 2019, guards found Epstein dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York. Investigators said he killed himself.
The next year, federal prosecutors charged his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, with sex crimes, saying she helped recruit girls, and also participated at times in the abuse that took place. She was convicted on several charges, including sex trafficking, conspiracy and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity. She began serving a 20-year prison sentence in 2022.
Abruzzo, the Palm Beach County clerk of courts, called what he read in the documents “disturbing.”
The 158-page transcript includes testimony of two of Epstein’s young victims. They explained how Epstein and assistants in his household recruited girls at Royal Palm Beach High School. Each girl was paid $200 to recruit another girl to the house, with the intent that they’d give him a “massage.”
Palm Beach Police investigator Joseph Recarey told jurors that Epstein told the young women involved in recruiting others, “the younger the better.” Epstein rejected one woman who was 23 because he said she was too old. Recarey pushed for more and tougher charges against Epstein but was thwarted by state attorney Barry Krischer’s office.
Assistant State Attorney Lanna Belohlavek asked both girls questions that appeared to be an attempt to undermine their credibility.
“You[‘re] aware that you committed a crime?” she asked one of the girls, who was 14 when Epstein sexually assaulted her during the “massage” he paid her $200 for.
“Now I am,” the girl answered. “I didn’t know it was a crime when I was doing it. Like, I, I don’t know. Now, I, I guess it’s prostitution or something like that.”
Belohlavek asked the second girl a similar question. She asked whether her father knew what she was doing to earn hundreds of dollars. The girl said she hid it from him.
“You understand that you in effect were committing prostitution yourself?” Belohlavek asked.
Several grand jurors also questioned the witnesses, including one who described the recruitment and payments by Epstein to the girls as “like this little micro-economy got spawned here.”
Abruzzo said those types of questions “diminished” the girls’ credibility, something prosecutors rarely do in front of a grand jury. At one point, Belohlavek brought in an investigator to testify about what the girls posted on their MySpace accounts, as well as prior trouble with their families and the law.
“And does her website also include pictures of her in skimpy attire, drinking alcohol, and sexually provocative photos?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the investigator responded.
Belohlavek could not be reached for comment.
When DeSantis signed the law to release the records in February, three of Epstein’s victims stood alongside him.
“I can’t express enough how we’ve all been so affected by this,” Haley Robson, one of the victims, said. “And I know for the regular, average citizen it’s just time that goes by. A lot of people tend to forget, but this is not something we should be forgetting about; this is not something to be sweeping under the rug. A lot of us are still in therapy; we’re still trying to survive.”
Another victim, Jena-Lisa Jones, said releasing the once-secret records was important to get the full picture.
“We have been left in the dark for so long with no answers to what is going on and why things played out the way that they did,” Jones said.
State Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman (R) who co-sponsored the bill to allow the records to be released, noted that two victims committed suicide in recent years.
“This debacle should never again be allowed to occur in our court system,” she said. “Law school professors throughout the country have lectured on this case as an example of miscarriage of justice and abuse of our system.”