American justice. We’re told that we’re supposed to have created a system of institutions that are intended to protect the weak and downtrodden, to bring restitution to victims and deter those who would attempt to harm others for their own profit and personal enjoyment. Unfortunately, that system has a fatal flaw, one that has repeatedly warped its purpose into the opposite of its intention,:rather than bringing balance to unfortunate events, it has instead punished the innocent and allowed the guilty to go free.
Recently, two prominent and horrible examples of this phenomenon have been in the spotlight: the sweetheart deal that was granted to supposed billionaire Jeffrey Epstein that allowed him to escape prison for his repeated sexual assault of dozens of children for years; and the new Netflix series When They See Us, which tells the story of the five kids from the Bronx who were wrongfully prosecuted and jailed, some for over a decade, for the assault and rape of a jogger in Central Park.
Sometimes, more often than it should be, Justice is not blind.
The Epstein story has received quite a bit of coverage lately, because the sweetheart plea deal his lawyers arranged back in 2008 for just 13 months of work release for “soliciting prostitution” from a single 17-year-old victim instead of possible conviction on 30 cases of sexual assault and statutory rape was negotiated by Alex Acosta, the current Trump administration secretary of labor who at the time was the U.S. attorney for South Florida.
Epstein’s home was raided last weekend, and documents and CDs containing dozens of pictures of naked underage girls were found, indicating that his predatory ways have continued since his prosecution in 2008, and showing that Acosta’s efforts were completely ineffective.
Raw Story reports on a New York Times editorial on Epstein’s use of his money and high-powered lawyers, Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, to threaten and bully Acosta and prosecutors into giving him his sweetheart deal.
On Monday, The New York Times editorial board published a blistering indictment not just of billionaire wealth manager and accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but of all the ways that the criminal justice system let itself be bent to his will at the mercy of his riches and political connections.
“Even in the relatively sterile language of the legal system, the accusations against Mr. Epstein are nauseating,” wrote the board. “From ‘at least in or about’ 2002 through 2005, the defendant ’sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls,’ some as young as 14 and many ‘particularly vulnerable to exploitation.’ The girls were ‘enticed and recruited’ to visit Mr. Epstein’s various homes ‘to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars.’ To ‘maintain and increase his supply of victims,’ he paid some of the girls ‘to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused,’ thus creating ‘a vast network of underage victims.'”
Acosta defended his handling of the Epstein case by claiming that “Epstein would have gotten away” with his actions if he hadn’t “stepped in,” and complained that “facts are being overlooked,” but other former federal prosecutors think that's a crock of shit.
Acosta had apparently told the Trump transition team that he was told to “back off” Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” But he gives a cagey, cryptic answer about that now.
“So there has been reporting to that effect and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects in this case, not just now but over the years and, again, I would hesitant to take this reporting as fact,” Acosta said during a press conference.
“This was a case that was brought by our office, it was brought based on the facts and I look at the reporting and others, I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines, but I can tell you that a lot of reporting is going down rabbit holes.”
CNN legal analyst Paul Callan demolished Acosta’s excuse that he didn’t want to “roll the dice” by having Epstein go to trial, because he might have been acquitted, by pointing out that they “never even picked up the dice”—never even interviewing the 30-40 victims in the case, who were all children at the time.
Barry Krichner, a former state prosecutor in Palm Beach, Florida, completely blew up Acosta’s excuses by pointing out that the state had acquired a grand jury indictment and there was a 53-page federal indictment with 30-40 witnesses before Acosta started his secret negotiations with the defense team’s firm— which, by the way, Acosta used to work for. Normally prosecutors negotiate with the defense at their offices, but Acosta met with the defense lawyer secretly at a hotel outside Miami and personally agreed to keep the deal secret from the victims in the case, in violation of the Criminal Victims Rights Act.
According to Raw Story, The Washington Post has since reported that White House officials are terrified that Epstein’s victims will testify before Congress, and that they’ll take the blame because of their lack of a real vetting process beyond Google and LexisNexis once they fired Chris Christie during the transition from campaign to administration.
Conservative OAN Network blamed Acosta’s actions in the Epstein case on Robert Mueller, but he was the FBI director at the time, and the bureau does the investigating; U.S. attorneys such as Acosta was at the time do the negotiating with defense lawyers.
Trump for his part has claimed that he “wasn’t a fan” of Epstein and that they had a falling-out 15 years ago, back when he was calling him a “terrific guy.” (According to some CNN guests, Epstein reportedly got caught at Mar-a-Lago hanging around kids and was kicked out.) Trump said he feels badly for Acosta, but he said nothing about how he feels for Epstein’s victims.
That shouldn’t be surprising. It's been alleged that for years Epstein manipulated young girls for sex and also held wild sex parties with his friends—who included Trump at the time. All of this is made even more horrible by that fact that one of those parties with Trump was the setting for a rape alleged by a Jane Doe accuser, also known by the pseudonym Katie Johnson, against Trump. The accuser, who was only 13 years old at the time, unfortunately dropped her case just before the 2016 election after receiving death threats.
Johnson said Trump had sexual contact with her at four of those parties, including tying her to a bed and violently raping her in a “savage sexual attack.” The lawsuit said Johnson “loudly pleaded” with Trump to stop, but that he responded by “violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted.”
After that, Trump allegedly threatened to harm or kill Johnson and her family if she ever told anyone. Johnson said Trump told her he could make them “disappear” like Maria — a 12-year-old girl Johnson says Trump also forced her to have sexual contact with, and whom Johnson hadn’t seen since that encounter.
Johnson also accused Epstein of raping her “anally and vaginally despite her loud pleas to stop,” and that he “attempted to strike Plaintiff about the head with his closed fists while he angrily screamed that he, Defendant Epstein, rather than Defendant Trump, should have been the one who took Plaintiff’s virginity.”
The court filings also included a statement from “Tiffany Doe,” another anonymous woman, who said that she witnessed the rapes and procured the young girls for the parties, and “Joan Doe,” a classmate of the victim who said she was told about the rapes during the following school year. Tiffany Doe said that Epstein and Trump knew that Johnson was 13.
The fact is that the details of this alleged assault by Trump closely match the recent rape allegation against him made by E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump attacked her in a department store changing room in 1995.
In the excerpt, Carroll describes an incident in Bergdorf Goodman, when she had a chance encounter with Trump while he was supposedly shopping for a gift for a woman. Carroll wrote that after Trump rejected the idea of buying a handbag or hat, he urged Carroll to come help him pick out lingerie. In her telling, he then urged her to try on a lace body suit as she jokingly suggested he try it on herself.
The two then went to the dressing room, where Carroll says she thought she could get Trump to try the bodysuit on over his pants. But Trump allegedly lunged at her in a dressing room and held her against the wall with his shoulder. She then described what happened next in vivid detail.
“The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle,” she wrote.
Carroll says she was able to force him off of her and run away and out of the department store, ending an episode she recalls lasting about three minutes.
There was also an allegation made by Jill Harth, who ultimately reached a settlement with Trump after suing him for attempted rape in 1993.
She first met Trump in December 1992 at his offices in Trump Tower, where she and her then romantic partner, George Houraney, were making a business presentation. The couple wanted to recruit Trump to back their American Dream festival, in which Harth oversaw a pin-up competition known as American Dream Calendar Girls. Harth described that meeting as “the highlight of our career”.
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It culminated in January 1993, when Harth and Houraney were visiting his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, to finalize and then celebrate the beauty pageant deal with a party.
After business concluded, Harth and Houraney were on tour of Mar-a-Lago along with a group of young pageant contestants – Trump wanted to “see the quality of the girls he was sponsoring”, Harth recalled – when he pulled her aside into one of the children’s bedrooms.
“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again,” Harth said, “and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”
All of this fits a pattern. Powerful and rich men such as Epstein and Trump have been able to use their attorneys to bully women into submission legally after having done the same to them physically. We’ve seen this in so many cases now, from Harvey Weinstein to Roger Ailes, from Bill O’Reilly to Bill Cosby. Some of them have now been stopped; many have not. What we’ve heard mostly from ineffective prosecutors such as Acosta has mostly been largely excuses and deflections.
On the other hand, when the accused are not affluent, when they don’t have a Rolodex full of Brooks Bros.-suited representation, the results can be decidedly different, even when prosecutors know from the very beginning that their theory of the case is completely wrong.
Such was the case of five youngsters in New York: Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, all boys of color between 14 and 16 years of age, who were threatened and bullied into false confessions and were prosecuted for aggravated assault, riot, and the rape of a 28-year-old white woman in Central Park in 1989, just a couple years before the period when Epstein was active and the rape allegations against Trump himself were made.
In 2012, filmmaker Ken Burns put together a documentary on the case that shows that, from the beginning, prosecutors knew that the physical evidence indicated a single attacker, based on footprints and drag marks. Dozens of young kids had been in the park at 10 PM partying—a “wilding wolf pack,” they were called—as they strutted down the pathways, shouting and shoving others out of the way. There were some fights and encounters with bicyclists, but those people became witnesses who testified that the kids were on one side of the park, while the jogger and her assailant were on the other side. During the two trials that took place, the juries ignored this testimony.
All of that went out the window once the taped false confessions were played in court.
It didn’t matter that the stories from the boys didn’t match up. It didn’t matter that there was no DNA from any of the boys at the scene of the crime, or that there was no DNA from the victim on the boys. It didn’t matter that the father of one of the boys, Korey Wise, had bullied his own son into telling the police “exactly what they wanted to hear” after police had threatened to get him fired from his job if he didn’t, and had even admitted that he had done this on the witness stand.
At the time of the trials, Donald Trump spent $1 million on a full-page newspaper ad that read, “Bring Back the Death Penalty — Bring Back the Police” arguing that the accused kids should be executed if the jogger—who was still in a coma during the entire trial—were to die.
Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us goes into further depth than Burns’ documentary did, showing the actions of the 30 kids that night who went into the park, even showing the bullying of cyclists and the fights that brought attention to them, and it shows the way the prosecution veered from the physical evidence to a theory that these boys had somehow materialized on the other side of the park and attacked this woman en masse, even though they only had the footprints of one person. How they doggedly pursued this wrong-headed theory and kept the kids in 72 hours of sustained interrogation without legal representation, or bathroom breaks, until they got what they wanted: confessions.
Actually, they weren’t full confessions; they were accusations. Each of the five kids claimed that he himself really didn’t do anything, but that he saw one of the other kids do something to the jogger, when in reality they didn’t even know each other and had never met. Their stories didn’t even match up. They all finally met each other for the first time in a holding cell after they’d taped their confessions, all blaming each other.
When they See Us, however, goes beyond the verdict and into the jails, and shows that, even after most of them were released, the five boys still had to deal with having a felony record and being registered as sex offenders. While several of them thrived despite the difficulties, one of them, Raymond Santana, had extreme difficulty putting his life back together and finding a job, ultimately falling into a life of drug-dealing and ending up back in jail. The worst story is that of Korey Wise, who had only gone to the police station in the first place to keep another of his friends company.
After they lost their cases at 17 years old, instead of going to juvenile detention first, as the others did, Korey went to Rikers Island, where, as a now-famous sex offender, he was repeatedly and viciously beaten until he ultimately took the advice of a guard and opted for solitary confinement. Ultimately, in an attempt to be moved to a prison that would allow his mother to visit more often, he requested a transfer and ended up in Attica, over 100 miles away from New York. All of episode 4 of When They See Us tells Korey’s harrowing story.
Again, at Attica, Korey opted mostly for solitary confinement to avoid the beatings, but during one period while he was working in a common room mopping the floor, he got into a physical altercation with another inmate over the volume of the TV. That inmate was Matias Reyes, a multiple rapist and murderer who had been the real attacker of that jogger in Central Park, Trisha Meili, that night in 1989.
Both Reyes and Wise were eventually transferred to yet another prison, and Reyes grew to respect Wise for his quiet strength and perseverance. He also grew religious and confessed to the attack on Meili in 2001, after 12 years. During the trial, the prosecution had used Meili’s jogging sweatshirt as evidence: It had originally been white, but after the attack it was brown from dirt and blood. DNA showed that it was Reyes’ blood, not that of any of the convicted boys. DNA testing also identified Reyes’, and only Reyes’, semen on the garment.
Wise and Santana were finally released, all five were fully exonerated, and another 10 years later a lawsuit resulted in their receipt of $41 million in restitution. Of course, that’s $41 million that had to be split five ways, after legal fees, but it was something.
Donald Trump, of course, thought the exoneration was a “big scam,” claiming that the original detectives—the ones who had coerced the false confessions—still claimed that the boys “were no angels” while in the park. They may not have been—but that doesn’t make them rapists.
When They See Us includes an additional fifth episode, which consists of an interview both with the cast of actors and with the now-adult Exonerated Five. The five say that they actually didn’t really know each other’s full stories until they watched the miniseries. They learned things from watching it. Hardly any of them really knew what Korey Wise had gone through in his years in solitary and how he had coped with it.
The difference between the various cases discussed above couldn’t be more stark, but the total imbalance of power is clear: in some cases the victims and in others the accused lack power, lack influence, and lack the finances required to protect oneself from those with greater affluence.
To this day, former prosecutor Linda Fairstein denies that she did anything wrong in prosecuting and overseeing the trials of the Exonerated Five, just as Alexander Acosta denies that he did anything wrong in the case of Jeffrey Epstein.
They did. They did a lot that was wrong, and many innocent young women and young men paid the price for what they did, and for what they didn’t do: protect the innocent, which was their responsibility.
We need to do better. We should expect better. Certainly better than Trump.