Billionaire hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, who has been accused of sexually assaulting underage girls for more than a decade, was arrested Saturday on sex trafficking charges. He was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. He’ll appear in federal court today. The New York Times reports he’s being accused of running a sex trafficking operation by luring underage girls—some as young as 14 years old—to his mansion in Manhattan.
He was previously accused of molesting and trafficking dozens, and potentially hundreds, of underage girls in Florida. But Epstein ended up serving just 13 months in county jail after the U.S. prosecutor in Florida, Alexander Acosta, cut what’s been described as “one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history.” The plea deal allowed Epstein to avoid a federal trial and possible life in prison, and effectively ended an FBI probe into the case. Alex Acosta is now Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
Jeffrey Epstein has counted Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton among his friends. They’ve flown with him. Trump told New York magazine in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said about his friend Jeffrey Epstein. Again, this was before all the charges were brought. In 2000, Trump was photographed with Epstein at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
— source democracynow.org | Jul 08, 2019