A bid by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged underage sexual abuse victims to undo an agreement not to prosecute the deceased financier on sex-trafficking charges more than a decade ago was rejected by a federal appeals court on Tuesday.
A three-judge panel on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that the case brought by Courtney Wild, who is now in her early 30s, cannot be pursued because no federal charges were filed in Florida at the time the deal was struck. The decision was handed down in a very apologetic manner.
“Despite our sympathy for Ms. Wild and other [victims] like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epstein’s hands, only to be left in the dark — and, so it seems, affirmatively misled — by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition,” the majority wrote in an opinion, according to the Miami Herald.
Even though the panel ruled against Wild, it described the plea agreement concealed from more than 30 underage victims identified by investigators as “a national disgrace.” Judge Kevin Newsom wrote in the majority opinion: “It’s not a result we like, but it’s the result we think the law requires.”
Judge Frank Hull issued a forceful dissent opinion.
“The majority concludes that our court is constrained to leave the victims ‘empty handed,’ and it is up to Congress to ‘amend the [CVRA] to make its intent clear. Not true. The empty result here is only because our court refuses to enforce a federal statute as Congress wrote it. The CVRA is not as impotent as the majority now rewrites it to be,” Hull wrote.
The panel’s decision will likely be appealed to the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Epstein was found dead at the age of 66 in August in his cell in the Manhattan correctional facility while awaiting trial for new child sex-trafficking charges. New York City’s chief medical examiner later ruled Epstein’s death a suicide.
Wild’s latest petition, filed in October, challenged the 2007 nonprosecution agreement that former Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta helped negotiate, saying it violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because she and other alleged victims were not consulted before the deal was struck.
Wild’s petition challenged the ruling handed down by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra in February 2019, which found that Wild and others were not eligible for any major relief, even though he found the prosecutors who agreed to the deal violated the rights of Epstein’s victims by not disclosing it.
Acosta, the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida at the time, reached the agreement with Epstein’s attorneys, which allow Epstein to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution solicitation charges related to a 17-year-old girl. As a part of the deal, Epstein served just 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail, was forced to pay restitution to certain victims, and was registered as a sex offender.
The agreement was reportedly struck before investigators had even finished interviewing all the alleged victims and was kept under wraps for more than a year. Epstein’s alleged victims didn’t learn of it until he was out of jail.
