>Epstein sex abuse victims tell court it's time for Acosta to explain his actions
>Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, already under federal investigation for a secret immunity deal he gave to a suspected sex trafficker of underage girls, may have to face some of those victims — who are now adult women — in a federal courtroom.
>In a new court filing, two victims, molested as teenagers a decade ago, are asking a federal judge to hold a hearing for all the women who were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier who received a non-prosecution agreement from Acosta when Acosta was a federal prosecutor in Miami in 2007.
>The controversial agreement negotiated by Acosta allowed Epstein to escape federal sex trafficking charges, even though evidence showed that Epstein had molested more than three dozen girls at his Palm Beach mansion in the 1990s and early 2000s. The victims were never told about the deal, which Acosta then sealed — thereby making it impossible for anyone, including his victims, to find out what crimes Epstein had committed and whether there were any other victims or accomplices involved.
>In February, U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth A. Marra declared that the non-prosecution agreement was illegal because it violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, designed by Congress to prevent crime victims from being ignored in the criminal justice process. In this case, the judge ruled, federal prosecutors deliberately hid the agreement from Epstein’s victims in violation of the law.
>Rather than undo the deal at the time of his ruling, Marra instead asked Epstein’s victims to file a court brief outlining some proposed remedies to resolve the court challenge, which dates back to 2008.
>It’s clear that the victims want to know what Acosta knew, when he knew it and why he worked with Epstein’s lawyers to conceal the deal from them.
>The victims’ lawyers have also asked the judge to force the Justice Department to release the entire FBI file on the Epstein matter, including evidence that was in front of a grand jury. They argue that there is legal precedent for releasing grand jury material based on “exceptional circumstances’’ in this case.
>“It is [an] extraordinary circumstance [for] the government to negotiate with a sex abuser about the extent to which his victims would be told about the disposition of a criminal charges involving them...and the fact that the government and a defendant agreed to ‘conceal the existence of the non-prosecution agreement and mislead the victims’...is truly extraordinary.’’
>At the time the government disposed of the case in 2008, the FBI had identified three dozen girls, most of whom were 13 to 16 years old when they were recruited by Epstein and others to give him massages that turned into sex acts. The recruitment resembled a pyramid scheme.
>Both Acosta and Sloman have defended their decision not to prosecute the case federally, arguing that the deal was not only fair but in line with the limited evidence and cooperation they had from the victims at the time. They pointed out that it forced Epstein to spend some time in jail and resulted in him having to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
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