Attorney Alan Dershowitz said it was lack of evidence that led to a plea deal struck by prosecutors and lawyers for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in a sex crimes case in 2008.
The deal, widely viewed as overly lenient, sent Epstein to jail and required he register as a sex offender in addition to paying victims of his sexual abuse thousands of dollars in settlement payments.
Dershowitz, a well-known legal expert, has represented Epstein in criminal cases in the past.
The 2008 case has been used by critics of U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida and prosecuted the case, to question his fitness for public service.
Epstein’s arrest over the weekend on new federal charges of sex trafficking from the Southern District of New York ignited calls from Democrats for Acosta to resign as the head of the Labor Department.
“For them, it was not a bad deal,” Dershowitz said Wednesday on CBS. “They got him to be a registered sex offender and pay vast amounts of money to all the women … and expose him for the world to see.”
Federal prosecutors saw the deal as “the best they could do,” Dershowitz said.
Some critics have suggested Epstein got off easy because he is rich.
“Wealth is a two-edged sword,” Dershowitz responded. “It helps you put together a very good legal team, but it also puts you in the public eye in a way that makes the prosecution work very hard.”
On Tuesday, Dershowitz celebrated the fact he was not named in the new indictments against Epstein.
“The important thing is that it doesn’t mention me,” he said. “The indictment itself is fairly bare bones.”
