Relentless Pursuit

by Bradley J. Edwards

  This one-on-one lawsuit with Epstein was consuming too much time. The distraction from my pursuit of Epstein in the CVRA case was unavoidable. He used the lawsuit as his vehicle for harassment, and because of the “litigation privilege”—a legal concept that allows parties in a lawsuit to say whatever they want about each other, whether true or false—he could say anything in the course of legal proceedings and suffer no consequences for it. And I would get stuck having to defend against each falsehood.

  I couldn’t sue him or his lawyers for lying about me. There was no effective redress. I simply had to keep litigating against him. Only if I could keep fighting to the end—and win—could I escape from this vindictive suit. Still, I saw the positive: yes, his lawsuit against me gave him a legal vehicle to carry out threats of harm, but it also gave me a legal vehicle to keep digging into his crimes with the goal of, one day, exposing those bad acts to law enforcement.

  This was no ordinary lawsuit, though, because he was no ordinary adversary. Epstein hired investigators who camped out outside my house. That caused me to hire my own investigator to watch his investigators.

  On one occasion in 2011, my investigator Mike Fisten found out through the private investigator community that one of Epstein’s hired henchmen believed he had uncovered information about me that they could finally use as blackmail. They had discovered that rather than driving home every day after work, I was actually driving to a woman’s house in Weston, Florida. They had placed a homing device on the bottom of my car and tracked me driving to this “secret rendezvous” every night. I laughed. My investigator didn’t. I assured him that his intel was wrong. Regardless, Mike said he needed to check my car to locate the tracking device. He found nothing.

  As we were standing by my car in the parking garage, Steve Jaffe pulled in his silver Infiniti M37. Steve drove the same make and model as I did at the time. Then it hit me: I looked at Mike and said, “Get the f*** out of here.” We walked over to Steve’s car and Mike began searching under the bumpers. Steve got out, really confused.

  They had placed the tracking device on Steve’s car. Idiots.

  * * *

  In addition to bothering me in the physical world, Epstein was employing psychological warfare in the courtroom. I had told him during one of our telephone calls that paying me money, alone, was never going to settle our case. I reiterated that before I ever settled anything, he would have to admit that he fabricated the entire case against me. If he didn’t do that, then I could never get him prosecuted—everyone would think whatever I said was made up as part of some civil litigation. I should not have told him that. He used every word he learned to his advantage.

  Knowing my position, he would file “proposals for settlement” with the court, offering to settle my case for hundreds of thousands of dollars, knowing that the case wasn’t about money for me. But what he also knew was that my refusal to accept a payment was something he could leverage into greater threats. Because of the way the law works in Florida, if I declined his offers to settle, went to trial, and obtained a jury verdict 25 percent less than the offer I had rejected, I would be responsible for paying his legal fees. Anyone want to take a guess at how many millions those were?

  To help you appreciate the gravity of this settlement proposal maneuver, let’s hypothetically say that Epstein offered to settle for $1 million. If a jury returned a verdict in my favor in the amount of $700,000, that might look like a win. In fact, the jury might think they had done me a favor. But in reality, because that amount was at least 25 percent less than his $1 million offer of settlement, which I had rejected, I would be responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s legal bills, which by the time of trial would exceed $10 million. Imagine the power he would have wielded with a $10 million judgment over my head for the rest of my life.

  This power was not lost on him. Going forward, he would continue to increase the monetary offers using this tool, knowing that I would turn them down on principle alone. This allowed him to offer a lot of money with no risk to him and a growing risk to me. Each time, he increased the chances that one day, he would have me and my family in a position to beg him for financial forgiveness. That was a risk that made everyone around me nervous. The advice from everyone I cared about and respected was to just end this personal battle and accept one of these offers and move on.

  But that would allow him to win, which was not an option. I had big plans for Mr. Epstein, and taking his money without forcing him to admit that his allegations against me were false was not going to happen.

  In response to one of the last proposals, I might have even set a record for the fastest rejection. I responded via email with my rejection of the proposal in less than a minute. Almost immediately, Epstein called me, laughing. But we both knew that this was a high-stakes game where there would be one big winner and one big loser—both of us were so dug in at this point that we couldn’t have it any other way.

  TWENTY-FOUR THE RAT

  BY JUNE 2012, EPSTEIN WAS running out of tricks and had nothing left to do by way of the law. After years of defending me, my team had amassed the evidence that proved his lawsuit had to be dismissed as a fraud. Once that happened, I could really prosecute my case against him for malicious prosecution. But there was more. Epstein was not going to abandon his action without taking Scott Rothstein’s deposition. That would be his only chance to tie me in to the Ponzi scheme.

  Many depositions had already been taken during the three years since Epstein filed his lawsuit against me. He took depositions of investors in the RRA Ponzi scheme, all of whom verified what everyone knew—that they didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, and I had nothing to do with Scott’s Ponzi scheme. But now, it was time to talk to Scott Rothstein himself, who by this time had been in prison for two years. All of us lawyers had to gather together in the U.S. Attorney’s Office while Rothstein joined us on the other end of a Skype connection, testifying from inside a witness protection unit against an all-white backdrop that gave no hint as to his location.

  Epstein’s last hope for his lawsuit against me depended entirely, and ironically, on the word of a convicted fraudster. I can’t say that no part of me was worried before the deposition began. I had no idea what Scott would say. I had hardly spoken with him while I was at RRA and had no communication with him since he had emptied the firm’s trust account, run off to Morocco, returned after being threatened, flipped on international Italian mobsters, and sent some of his friends to jail.

  The first thing that struck me when I saw Scott in June 2012 was that the twitch that I told you about earlier was completely gone. I guess prison was less stressful than managing a $1 billion fraud.

  Scott explained in great detail how he started the Ponzi scheme in 2005 and continued its operation through November 2009. He was able to run it for that long because he created a legitimate law firm as its front with many excellent lawyers. He described having a dozen or so co-conspirators, people who were aware of the crimes that he was committing and helped him, to some degree, to pull them off. Having been incarcerated, Scott was certainly in no mood to hold back on ratting out those who’d been involved with him.

  Because Epstein knew that Rothstein had tried to use my cases against Epstein to commit his fraud, Epstein and I, in a sense, had a common interest in getting to the truth behind it. But this was a complicated problem for Epstein. He wanted to know the facts, but at the same time, he didn’t want to exonerate me. This was tricky because the facts did indeed exonerate me, and he knew it. So how could he walk that tightrope?

  Since Epstein had set Rothstein’s deposition, I thought there was a chance he’d paid him to lie. Epstein certainly had the money to buy that kind of testimony, and what risk was it to Rothstein to take it? This was, of course, the guy who had hidden a 12.08 carat yellow diamond from the FBI even after he’d been caught running the second-largest Ponzi scheme ever. I figured Epstein would convince Scott that he, Epstein, could make a legal maneuver to shorten Scott’s sen
tence or even make it go away. Anything was possible.

  My case relied on one piece of testimony that was totally unpredictable: Scott Rothstein’s. If Scott lied and said that I was involved, I would have to spend the rest of my life trying to prove my innocence.

  Epstein’s attorney Tonja Haddad Coleman took the lead questioning Rothstein. She went into the detailed workings of the Ponzi scheme and had Rothstein admit that it was conducted inside a law firm where I was working. But she didn’t want to let him speak too much about my noninvolvement, so she didn’t elicit those answers. Instead, she left things muddy enough for an observer to draw their own conclusion about my possible involvement. This was, of course, mildly infuriating.

  On cross-examination, Jack Scarola gave Rothstein the opportunity to testify freely about me through questions I had written out for Jack to ask. Rothstein explained from his bunker that I was a victim of the scheme. He apologized for hiring me into the law firm that he knew was crumbling beneath him. He then verified what everyone already knew: he had hardly spoken with me, and his improper, illegal, and sensational pitches to investors about how he would capitalize on Epstein’s crimes were concocted by him alone—without my knowledge. While I was dedicating my time to the prosecution of my cases, including those against Epstein, unbeknownst to me (and most of the other lawyers in the firm), Scott was running a massive fraud. The truth of my noninvolvement in the Ponzi scheme was now on the record. Rothstein’s testimony killed any chance Epstein had of proceeding with his baseless claims.

  On August 16, 2012, Jeffrey Epstein had run out of legal rope and filed a voluntary dismissal of his lawsuit against me. The deposition of Scott Rothstein had been his last Hail Mary pass. I was finally going to be able to focus on my malicious prosecution case against Epstein and my investigation of his sexual misdeeds.

  TWENTY-FIVE GOOD VERSUS EVIL

  ON JULY 17, 2013, the Third District Court of Appeal in Florida issued an opinion in the case of Wolfe v. Foreman, a case that I wasn’t involved in but that had a legal impact on my own case against Jeffrey Epstein because it addressed the central legal issue in my case. I was actually on a cruise ship in Alaska with my wife, my former boss Earleen, and Earleen’s husband when I first saw the opinion. I was scrolling through a random legal digest when it jumped out at me.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. This court held that the litigation privilege Jeffrey Epstein was relying on as a safe harbor to attack me prevented me from continuing to litigate my case against him. The court basically announced that malicious prosecution no longer existed in Florida. My case against Epstein was a case for malicious prosecution. In other words, this one decision single-handedly eliminated my entire lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein. It was no later than six o’clock in the morning when I finished reading and called Earleen. Maybe I was misunderstanding, I thought. Nope. Earleen confirmed my fears. A court in Miami had essentially ruled that malicious prosecution was officially abolished.

  I was worried.

  Seeing an opportunity to exploit this, Epstein made a good move. He filed a motion for summary judgment and asked Judge Donald Hafele, the judge presiding over my case, to throw it out based on Wolfe v. Foreman.

  Let’s rewind for a minute. Back in 2009, I had actually moved to recuse Judge Hafele, who, coincidentally, was the same judge who presided over Courtney and Lynn’s state court cases against Jeffrey Epstein. The reason for that motion was simple. I had moved for the court to allow punitive damages to be assessed against Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of my clients. Punitive damages are usually allowed in cases where the conduct of the defendant is intentionally harmful. Since Epstein’s conduct as a serial child molester was certainly that, I assumed the court would grant this request without even a hearing. Instead, Judge Hafele held a long hearing in which he focused on the character of the alleged victims rather than the behavior of Epstein.

  I was taken aback by this one. During the hearing, Hafele agreed with Jeffrey Epstein’s counsel, stating:

  Now, balanced with that [plaintiff’s burden of proof] is the obvious concerns for the court in terms of trying to, on the one hand, not expose the alleged victims to unfettered invasions of their privacy, but at the same time recognize that the allegations here and the nature of the facts that have been developed thus far are quite different than what would be a rape case by a stranger, different from a sexual assault case on a one-time basis by a stranger or someone known to the victim. Here we have elements of prostitution that are ingrained in the facts of the case. While I understand the privacy nature of sexual activity, when we have cases like this—I think as Mr. Critton aptly pointed out, without trying to be disrespectful to the alleged victims—we’re not necessarily dealing, as far as the information known to date, with what would otherwise be considered traditional or normal high school–aged women relative to the things that went on here as contended by [Lynn] in her statement.

  Judge Hafele was new to the Jeffrey Epstein cases and I had never appeared in front of him before. He ultimately granted my motion for punitive damages but hinted that it was a close call. A close call? Child molestation was borderline something that should be punished? What alternate universe was I in?

  This was unsettling to me. Because of his words, I filed a motion the next day formally asking Judge Hafele to step down from these cases and allow a different judge to take over. Judge Hafele denied that request and remained on the girls’ cases.

  Now, five years after Epstein filed a fake lawsuit against me and I had to sue him back, Hafele was the judge on my case.

  On May 19, 2014, Judge Hafele granted Epstein’s motion against me, which effectively got rid of my whole case against Jeffrey Epstein. Regardless of where anyone’s pieces were on the chessboard on that day, the board was flipped upside down. It was as if I had him in check with nowhere to go and suddenly, he reversed the board and checkmated me.

  It didn’t end there.

  Epstein asked the court to make me pay his attorneys’ fees, since he’d in effect won the case that I had brought against him. The court granted that motion, too. The only way that I could avoid paying Epstein $10 million in fees (which, big surprise, I definitely did not have) was to overturn Judge Hafele’s decision on appeal. Epstein held this over my head. This was the first time Epstein’s threats against me had become a reality. He was finally in a legally supportable position to financially destroy me and there wasn’t much that I could do about it. I was vulnerable and I knew it. It finally hit me that the bad guy could actually win.

  He called me to say, “I told you that you should have walked away from this. I never wanted to do this to you. I told you fighting me was not fair. You and your family are now bankrupt. I’ll give you one last chance to walk away. Really walk away. Do not ever pursue a case against me again. And the CVRA case must end. Now. If you appeal this decision, I can’t help you anymore. You will have made a decision to self-destruct, but don’t say I wasn’t fair.”

  Against Epstein’s advice, I filed my appeal.

  TWENTY-SIX WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  I PROVIDED VIRGINIA ROBERTS’S INFORMATION TO the FBI, and on July 5, 2013, FBI agents interviewed her at the United States Consulate General in Sydney, Australia, to inquire about her time with Jeffrey Epstein. This interview sparked something in Virginia that she had tried for years to suppress. In the summer of 2014, she moved back to the United States. She did this because of how important the CVRA case was to her. She felt compelled to come home and fight not just for herself, but for all of Epstein’s victims. She didn’t know Courtney, but she loved what Courtney stood for and wanted to join in.

  In addition to becoming a force in the CVRA case, Virginia wanted to see Epstein criminally prosecuted. Since she was a victim in many other jurisdictions, prosecution seemed like a reasonable goal given the extent of the crimes that had been committed against her. Remember, she had unique, often eyewitness information about how widespread Epstein’s crimes really were. She came to Am
erica with her family for the sole purpose of continuing her crusade to bring her perpetrators to justice and help other similarly situated crime victims in any way that she could. When she arrived, we met to discuss how best to go about achieving her goals.

  Shortly after our meeting, I received an entirely unexpected telephone call. I was at home in bed at eleven thirty on a Friday night when my phone rang. As soon as I said hello, the voice on the other end went into a windup that eventually became familiar.

  “Let me introduce myself,” the caller said. “My name is Stan Pottinger. I’m sure you get a lot of crazy calls about this subject matter—Jeffrey Epstein—but hear me out. I have a civil rights practice in New York. Before that, I was the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department in Washington. In addition to my own current work, I sometimes work on cases with David Boies. I’ve been contacted to represent one of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and have told David about it. We understand that you’re the expert and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I’m calling to see if it makes sense to work together.”

  I asked him whether he represented a client who was victimized in New York or in Florida, and he told me Florida. I then told him I would keep it in confidence, but if he said the name of the victim, I would probably know her situation. When he identified the victim, I walked out on the balcony of my room and explained, “I’m not sure where you got your case from, but you have a problem. Your client was represented in the previous underlying litigation, and while she may not have liked her attorney [not me], or the representation she received, I know for a fact that she signed a settlement agreement with Jeffrey Epstein already.” Stan explained that this was not his understanding, but he would check it out and get back to me the next day.