Filthy Rich

CODA

Scott Rothstein

On October 27, 2009, Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, left Scott Rothstein a voice-mail message.

“Hey, Scott,” the governor said. “It’s Charlie, your favorite Greek governor. Hope you’re doing well, buddy. Just wanted to touch base and let you know I’m working Versace for November twenty-fourth, and it is going amazingly well-unbelievable, brother…Really enjoyed again seeing you and Kimmie and watch[ing] a little football and best to you guys from Carol and me. We love you. Take care. Bye-bye.”

That same day, Rothstein took a chartered Gulfstream V to Casablanca, Morocco. For a while, it seemed as if Rothstein was running. But a few days later, the same Gulfstream returned to Fort Lauderdale. The Ponzi king had decided to turn himself in.

The moment he did, he started to sing like a canary in return for a lenient sentence. Rothstein gave up dozens of associates-the list included people at his law firm, law enforcement officers, and his own wife, Kimmie, who was arrested for hiding more than one million dollars’ worth of jewelry.

All in all, more than thirty people involved in Rothstein’s schemes were arrested and sentenced.

Thanks, in part, to his cooperation with the feds, his was the only Ponzi scheme in history in which all the victims recovered their money. In return, Rothstein was put into a witness protection program and is serving his fifty-year sentence anonymously, in an undisclosed prison location.

Alan Dershowitz

On November 10, 2015, Alan Dershowitz arrived at Shriver Hall, on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“The outlines for peace are so obvious,” he said. “There has to be a two-state solution.”

Fifteen minutes into the talk, a group of women-students belonging to a group called Hopkins Feminists-stood up in protest. Dressed all in black, with duct tape over their mouths, they held up a sign and marched out of the hall.

YOU ARE RAPE CULTURE, the sign read.

Afterward, a reporter for the student paper asked Dershowitz about Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s victims. Wasn’t it true that Dershowitz had implied that one of those victims was “asking for it?”

“I’m a defense attorney,” Dershowitz replied. “I have an obligation under the Constitution to provide a full and zealous defense to my clients. If I have failed to do all the things you had just listed, I could be disbarred. I could be found incompetent as counsel.”

He asked the reporter, “Would any defense lawyer not look on the websites, look on social networks, find out what the woman who was accusing my client was doing? We were able to disprove many of the charges, just like how I was able to disprove the charges against me. Falsely charging somebody with rape is a heinous thing to do. First of all, it creates horrors for the person who has been falsely accused. Second, it so hurts real rape victims because it makes it clear that some women lie for money. Our country, unlike others, requires that everybody be defended, and I’m going to continue to do that whether my clients are guilty or innocent. Let me tell you, most of my clients have been guilty. They deserve a zealous defense just as anybody else. I’m very proud of what I did for Jeffrey Epstein. If people don’t like the fact that I got a ‘good deal,’ that’s the job I do.”

The suits and countersuits Paul Cassell, Bradley Edwards, and Dershowitz filed against each other dragged on into the spring of 2016-reaching a crescendo with Dershowitz’s argument about the plot to blackmail Les Wexner. But on April 8, all the parties involved agreed to settle, issuing a joint statement that read: “Edwards and Cassell acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz; and the sexual misconduct accusations made in all public filings (including all exhibits) are hereby withdrawn. Dershowitz also withdraws his accusations that Edwards and Cassell acted unethically. Neither Edwards, Cassell, nor Dershowitz have any intention of repeating the allegations against one another.” Dershowitz also hired former FBI director Louis J. Freeh to do an independent investigation. Freeh concluded that the evidence his team reviewed refuted the accusations of sexual misconduct against Dershowitz.

For Alan Dershowitz, the long nightmare he’d had to endure as a result of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein finally seemed to be over.

Ghislaine Maxwell

Trying to put her troubles with Epstein behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell took up a new calling.

“She’s doing something to save the oceans now,” a socialite says over the din of cocktail-party chatter at a private Palm Beach Club.

Maxwell’s nonprofit, the TerraMar Project, describes itself as “a platform for citizenship and transformation of the high seas.” Its focus is on cleaning up the eight million metric tons of plastic debris-garbage-that are dumped into the world’s oceans each year. (Sources say that an earlier enterprise, the Seed Media Group, was funded by Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 to the tune of two million dollars.)

“Is anybody here staying awake at night because they’re frightened about the ocean?” she asks in 2014 at a TEDx talk in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Are you scared about what could happen? Are you trying to think about what could you do that would help the ocean and all its myriad of troubles?”

But although her efforts on behalf of the environment are sincere and articulate, Ghislaine still appears in the society pages.

In 2010, she attends Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in Rhinebeck, New York.

In 2014, New York journalist Richard Johnson reports that she’s newly back from running in an Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska. “It’s hard to top Ghislaine Maxwell in the globe-trotting department,” he writes.

Upon her return, the president of the China Arts Foundation International hosts Maxwell at a dinner cooked by the former chef for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Sources say that Maxwell still maintains her warm relationship with the Clintons. She was never charged with a crime. And Maxwell has repeatedly denied all allegations made by Virginia Roberts-and continues to do so today. Through her lawyer, Maxwell says she’s had no connection to any criminal misconduct involving Virginia Roberts (or any other young woman) and Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that Virginia’s story about her experience as a “sex slave” has changed, significantly, over time-that with each telling, Virginia adds salacious details and names new public figures. Nevertheless, legal troubles for Maxwell recently began.

In 2015, Virginia Roberts filed a defamation suit against the woman she says recruited her to work at Epstein’s house on El Brillo Way. In January of 2016, Roberts filed additional papers, claiming that a defamation suit filed against Bill Cosby, another alleged sexual predator, was directly relevant to her case against Maxwell. In March, Maxwell filed an answer in court denying all of Roberts’s allegations and accusing Roberts of fabricating them for financial gain.

As of this writing, the suit is ongoing.

Prince Andrew

In January of 2016, Sunninghill Park-the twelve-bedroom estate that Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew once shared in the English county of Berkshire-was bulldozed.

Prince Andrew had long since sold the home, which he and Sarah had received as a gift after their 1986 wedding. He got into hot water when it was revealed that the buyer, a Kazakh billionaire named Timur Kulibayev, had paid three million pounds more than the home’s asking price.

For her part, Sarah Ferguson announced that she was moving into a thirteen-million-pound ski chalet in Switzerland.

It was a fitting end to the long, sometimes sordid story of the prince’s marriage. But it was not the end of the scandals that seemed always to be swirling around the prince.

On January 2, 2015, Virginia Roberts’s allegations about her relationship with the prince-and the photo of him with his arm around Roberts’s waist-appeared in the press. Prince Andrew was forced to cut short a skiing holiday to confer with his mother, the queen, and to issue a statement denying Roberts’s allegations-a step that was widely seen as being without precedent for a member of the royal family.

That same month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the prince was again forced to “reiterate and to reaffirm” the repeated denials made by Buckingham Palace that he had any sort of sexual relationship with Roberts, who had announced in papers filed at the start of the year that Prince Andrew has a “sexual interest in feet.”

“My focus is on my work,” Prince Andrew said at the time.

Asked by a reporter, “Will you be making a statement?” the prince refused to answer.

A few days later, Virginia Roberts signed a sworn statement in which she said, “I did have sexual contact with him as I have described here-under oath. Given what he knows and has seen, I was hoping that he would simply voluntarily tell the truth about everything. I hope my attorneys can interview Prince Andrew under oath about the contacts and that he will tell the truth.”

According to several reports, Roberts’s lawyers had written to the prince, asking him to respond to her allegations in court. Reportedly, Buckingham Palace refused delivery of the letter.

“I knew he was a member of the British royal family, but I just called him ‘Andy,’” Roberts had said in her statement. “I got news from Maxwell that I would be meeting a prince. Later that day, Epstein told me I was meeting a ‘major prince.’ Epstein told me ‘to exceed’ everything I had been taught. He emphasized that whatever Prince Andrew wanted, I was to make sure he got.”

Signing her name to the document, Roberts wrote, “I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.”

That spring, Prince Andrew got a rare break: a federal judge in South Florida ordered that the allegations Roberts made be stricken from civil-court records. “At this juncture in the proceedings, these lurid details are unnecessary,” the judge concluded. Once again, Buckingham Palace vehemently denied the prince’s involvement in any activities, sexual or otherwise, pertaining to Roberts. But that same year, reports leaked that the BBC program Panorama was working on an in-depth investigation into the prince’s dealings with Epstein and Roberts.

As of this writing, the investigation has yet to air.

Barry Krischer

“I have no intention of being dragged into that conversation,” Barry Krischer said in 2016 when contacted via telephone and asked about Jeffrey Epstein.

More than a decade had passed since Epstein’s case first landed on the state attorney’s desk.

“The New York Times has called me,” said Krischer. “The British papers. I’m not interested in being pulled into that conversation. I know that the police chief didn’t think the case was handled right, but that’s why he’s a cop and I’m a prosecutor.”

Krischer, who left the state attorney’s office in 2009, is still a member of the Criminal Justice Commission in Palm Beach County. Since his retirement, he’s volunteered one morning a week at the office of the state attorney and two mornings a week at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

He still remains active in child welfare issues, working with the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Despite his continued involvement with local law enforcement, he hasn’t spoken to Michael Reiter in years.

Bradley Edwards

In December of 2009, Jeffrey Epstein filed suit, under Florida’s RICO act, against Scott Rothstein, the jailed Ponzi king; Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who’d worked, briefly, in Rothstein’s law firm, RRA, and represented several of Epstein’s victims; and one of those victims, an individual referred to in the lawsuit as “L.M.”

“Upon information and belief,” the suit stated, “EDWARDS knew or should have known that ROTHSTEIN was utilizing RRA as a front for the massive Ponzi scheme and/or were selling an alleged interest or investment in the Civil Actions (and other claims) involving Epstein.” The suit also claimed that, “By using Civil Actions against EPSTEIN as ‘bait’ and fabricating settlements regarding same, ROTHSTEIN and others were able to lure investors into ROTHSTEIN’S lair and bilked them of millions of dollars which, in turn, was used to fund the litigation against EPSTEIN for the sole purpose of continuing the massive Ponzi scheme.”

Moreover, the suit claimed, L.M. had “testified she never had sex with Epstein; worked at numerous strip clubs; is an admitted prostitute and call girl; has a history of illegal drug use (pot, painkillers, Xanax, Ecstasy); and continually asserted the 5th Amendment during her depositions in order to avoid answering relevant but problem questions for her.” (The suit made similar claims about two other victims.) According to the suit, L.M. had said only good things about Epstein when interviewed by the FBI in 2007, while being represented by another lawyer. Her story “changed dramatically,” the suit claimed, once she was “in the hands of EDWARDS and RRA.”

In a motion for summary judgment filed by Bradley Edwards, Edwards denied all of these allegations, calling Epstein’s claims frivolous for two separate reasons: On the one hand, Edwards claimed, Epstein was seeking damages from Edwards while asserting his own Fifth Amendment privilege to block the discovery of relevant facts. (And, in fact, Epstein did plead the Fifth, dozens of times, when deposed by the lawyers of his victims.) On the other hand, Epstein’s claims were “directly contradicted by all of the record evidence.

“The truth in the record is entirely devoid of any evidence to support Epstein’s claims and is completely and consistently corroborative of Edwards’s sworn assertion of innocence,” the motion stated.

Put simply, Epstein has made allegations that have no basis in fact. To the contrary, his lawsuit was merely a desperate measure by a serial pedophile to prevent being held accountable for repeatedly sexually abusing minor females. Epstein’s ulterior motives in filing and prosecuting this lawsuit are blatantly obvious. Epstein’s behavior is another clear demonstration that he feels he lives above the law and that because of his wealth he can manipulate the system and pay for lawyers to do his dirty work-even to the extent of having them assert baseless claims against other members of the Florida Bar. Epstein’s Complaint against Edwards and LM is nothing short of a far-fetched fictional fairy-tale with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support his preposterous claims. It was his last ditch effort to escape the public disclosure by Edwards and his clients of the nature, extent, and sordid details of his life as a serial child molester. Edwards’s Motion for Summary Judgment should be granted without equivocation.

Edwards filed a counterclaim for malicious prosecution. “He sued me with knowingly made up, falsified facts,’ Edwards says.

And his sole motivation was to extort me into abandoning the legitimate cases I was pursuing against him on behalf of the victims, including the CVRA suit. He ultimately had to dismiss that case, literally on the morning our Summary Judgment was to be heard. I then sued him. We were set for trial. The judge granted me punitive damages in my claim. And then, in a separate case in Florida, one of the appellate courts basically abolished the tort of malicious prosecution in Florida. My case was dismissed. I then appealed that. And our district ruled that my malicious prosecution claim can stand and the tort is not abolished in Florida. They sent it back to the trial court and Jeffrey Epstein appealed that to the State Supreme Court, and that’s where that stands.

Sarah Kellen

“She said her name was Clara something on the rental application,” says a real estate agent in Palm Beach. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized she was associated with Epstein.”

In April of 2009, that agent rented Clara a bungalow in Palm Beach. For Clara, that little home was a step down from Jeffrey Epstein’s big house on El Brillo Way and from the life she’d known as Sarah Kellen. But not such a step down. “She signed a lease to pay four thousand dollars a month from April 18 through July 18, 2009,” says a Palm Beach resident familiar with the local housing market. “But she stayed a lot longer. And by the way, she went on a round-the-world trip for at least a month while she had the lease.”

Kellen had been a prime suspect in Chief Reiter’s investigation. Prosecutors had considered charging her, Wendy Dobbs, and Nadia Marcinkova as potential coconspirators. They’d avoided those charges as part of the plea deal that Epstein had struck-a deal in the course of which it was suggested that if Epstein had to have pleaded to something, he could have pleaded to striking Kellen-or slapping her, once, on his jet. Assault, they’d have called it.

Kellen might have gone along with that. But in the end she didn’t need to. Sources say she found another rich man as Epstein whiled away his hours in and out of the Palm Beach Stockade. She reinvented herself, and when her relationship with the wealthy man fell apart, she played the field until she met and married a race-car driver named Brian Vickers. Along the way she reinvented herself yet again, changing her name to Sarah Kensington.

Nadia Marcinkova

Nadia Marcinkova changed her surname to Marcinko and, after training at a Palm Beach flight school, became a commercial pilot and certified flight instructor. Calling herself Gulfstream Girl on Facebook, she cultivated her social media presence until 2013, when the Gulfstream company filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against her. When the suit was settled out of court, in 2014, Marcinko changed “Gulfstream” to “Global.”

“As a child,” she wrote for the “About Me” page on her website, “Nadia channeled her entrepreneurial spirit by selling invisible pets to neighboring kids. She continued on to manage a successful family marketing business and soon she was discovered by a modeling agency and immersed into the marketing and advertising world as a spokesperson and international fashion model.”

There is no mention of Jeffrey Epstein. But on her YouTube channel, Marcinko appears in the cockpit of a Gulfstream II that looks very much like Epstein’s Gulfstream, sitting beside a man who looks much like Larry Visoski, a pilot for Epstein.

Marcinko’s Manhattan address belongs to a building where Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark, owns the majority of apartments.

Sarah Kensington uses the same address in New York.

The Girls

One of the girls who gave Jeffrey Epstein massages moved to Los Angeles and became an actress, starring for a time in a soap opera and appearing in several films. She is now pursuing a career in country music.

Several girls have been arrested for drugs, prostitution, and other nonviolent crimes.

One girl is dead-murdered by her boyfriend for reasons that had nothing to do with Epstein.

One of the girls who claimed to have been raped by Epstein is now a successful real estate broker in South Florida.

Mary moved back in with her parents, finished high school, and attended college for a while. She had her ups and downs along the way. In 2010, she was arrested for shoplifting. But Mary, who was born in 1990, is still in her midtwenties-still young for a man of Jeffrey Epstein’s age-with many good years ahead of her.

Wendy Dobbs studied nursing in college and became a bartender and waitress. “I want to fill a position in which I can [utilize] my communication and customer service skills to help others,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I feel I am at my best when I can make a difference in someone’s life. My goal is to inspire and encourage others to make positive changes daily. If you are not reaching for the stars then your dreams are not big enough.”

The Cops

Michele Pagan is now a sergeant for the Palm Beach Police Department.

In early 2012, at a reception at Mar-a-Lago, Detective Joe Recarey received the first Palm Beach Police Foundation Police Officer of the Year award-one of several honors he received in the course of his twenty-three-year career in Palm Beach. Two years later, he left the department and took a job as director of loss prevention for the Gold Coast Beverage company.

“I’ve been [at the Palm Beach Police Department] longer than my children have been alive,” he told a reporter for the Palm Beach Daily News when he left. “I’m going to miss a majority of the people I’ve worked with, and, obviously, I’m going to miss the work. This is my extended family. Like many families, you have disagreements with some family members. But you overlook that, and you work together and you’re a team. I’m going to look back and miss a lot of the people I’ve worked with.”

Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter left the department in 2008 after twenty-eight years on the job. He now runs his own security company in Palm Beach.

Jean-Luc Brunel

In January of 2015, Jean-Luc Brunel sued his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that Epstein’s fall from grace had cost him millions of dollars in business and caused him “severe emotional stress.”

The lawsuit claimed, “Plaintiff Brunel is emotionally destroyed as a result of Epstein’s actions and the resulting effects on his business. He has been on medications to deal with the effects of this.”

It continues: “Defendant Epstein recklessly inflicted emotional distress on Plaintiff Brunel by engaging in illegal conduct with under-aged girls, which was falsely linked to Plaintiff…This illegal conduct was extreme and outrageous by any standard.”

The suit went on to quote Brunel’s doctor, who said that the modeling scout had gone into psychotherapy “due to a subjective sense of depression related to what he believes is a loss of business in his modeling agency as a result of slander published against his business.” Brunel had gone on prescription drugs-Prozac, Rivotril-as a result.

The fashion world had frozen him out, he said, after his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had become public. It had become impossible for him to find the “fresh faces” he needed for his agency, MC2.

Brunel acknowledged Epstein’s alleged crimes but denied his own involvement. “Epstein’s illegal activities were outrageous and extreme; they involved receiving massages from the under-aged girls while the girls were nude or nearly nude; penetration of the girls with a finger or object; or full intercourse.”

When the Daily Beast reported the story and reached out to Brunel for a comment, the website’s reporter was told, “Jean-Luc is not in town; he’s in South America.”

Brunel’s agency, MC2, is still in business.

Jeffrey Epstein

As of this writing, Jeffrey Epstein continues to entertain young women at his Manhattan town house.