When Jeffrey Epstein Joked About Sex Abuse
One of the many gutting elements of the allegations against the billionaire financier: how gleefully he flaunted his impunity.
“I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender’ … It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”
That was the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, in 2011, —bragging, really—to the , about the deal that his lawyers had struck a few years earlier on his behalf. In 2007, the FBI had prepared a 53-page indictment of Epstein, a document alleging that the financier, from his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, had been conducting a kind of sexual pyramid scheme (as one detective it) in which he molested and abused young women and girls—some as young as 14—and paid them to recruit others. The allegations ; they were severe
