Along the way of our litigation, he had almost escaped. And he had come close to getting a legal break that would have put him in a position to financially ruin me (and my family). Which in turn would have allowed him to spin a message that his victory was on the merits, real and deserved, and not merely technical.
Yet I had survived. He was out of ammunition. Even his last resort, the one he could always count on—his money—couldn’t solve this problem for him this time. The trial was quickly approaching, and while it would present a watered-down version of his misdeeds, he could not confidently predict how it would come out. There was a national spotlight on the trial. Courtroom View Network had already been granted gavel-to-gavel live courtroom coverage of it. The whole country would be watching, and he knew it.
Even a fraction of the information that I could unveil at trial would cause the world to finally hear things he could not afford for people to know. The truth about his prior NPA immunity deal and the work I had done to try to unwind it would be exposed. The fact that there were over one hundred victims would be known. The other locations where he had committed crimes and did not have immunity from arrest and prosecution would be out there. The identities of some of his personal friends, business associates, and co-conspirators would be revealed. All of this and more would increase the risk of his being arrested one day. And that—the prospect of having to serve a real prison term—was his Achilles’ heel. It was the only thing that really frightened him. He was not fit for confinement.
Of course, I still had significant risk on my side as well. Remember, he had filed a proposal for settlement for a significant amount of money, which I had rejected. If I got a verdict that was 25 percent less than his offer, the law said that even though I won the trial, I would be responsible for his attorneys’ fees, which were in the many millions of dollars. It would be a financial disaster. And I knew this was possible because his argument that I had suffered no real damages from his smear was not without merit.
Trial was to begin right after Thanksgiving, on December 4, 2018. The two of us were still communicating regularly, and neither of us was budging.
* * *
More troubling to me than the stress associated with the upcoming event was the time it was taking me away from my family. For now, no matter how hectic things ever got, I made sure I did whatever I needed to do to spend quality time with my wife and boys. Most important, I was never going to miss one of my kids’ games. In fact, from the time each of them was four years old, I was Blake and Austin’s head football coach and Cashton’s soccer coach.
If it meant that I needed to get to work at four o’clock in the morning every day so that I could be at practice by five p.m., I did it. I would never let the kids suffer because I was busy at work. Sometimes this was easier said than done, and this year, it was more difficult than ever. Still, up until this point I had managed to keep the norm no matter what.
On November 3, 2018, my oldest son, Blake, and I won our fourth youth football league Super Bowl with him as quarterback and me as head coach. He was named MVP of the game. Austin and I lost our Super Bowl game that year on a last minute touchdown, but he was also named the MVP, and I was named the coach of the year. There was nothing I enjoyed more than coaching my boys and teaching them the lessons my dad and Papa taught me.
But now we were running into soccer season and with around-the-clock preparation necessary, I was, for the first time, not able to devote the time I wanted to coaching Cashton’s team. This was weighing on me.
Not only that but Thanksgiving was approaching. Thanksgiving is a holiday that carries so much tradition and meaning with my family, I wouldn’t have wanted it interrupted for anything. As far back as I can remember, my family has gone camping in the woods on Thanksgiving. When I was small, it was only my immediate family, including my grandparents, Granny and Papa.
During most of my childhood, we pitched a single tent and slept in sleeping bags and on air mattresses. At least one of them would deflate the first night and leave someone sleeping on sticks. We had campfires every night where we roasted marshmallows and made s’mores. In the mornings, we would cook stick-biscuits, which literally meant wrapping biscuit dough around a stick and poking it into a fire. When the biscuit was finished cooking, we would fill the middle with butter, sometimes cinnamon, too, and eat it. I can almost taste one now.
During the days, we would ride bikes, fish, hike, and throw around a football. There were no cell phones. This holiday in the woods was a protected sanctuary. It was an especially great time for my brothers and me because we could play all day and no one made us shower. Besides, we didn’t need no stinkin’ shower, considering we swam in the nearby lake and tubed down the river.
I was always so fascinated by my twin younger brothers, Travis and David. I can remember when they were born, even though I was only four years old. I thought that their being identical twins made them the coolest people in the world.
There is a story that my mom would probably remember better than I, but I’ll tell it just the same. One day she was pulled over for speeding with all three of us in the car. I sat in the back seat, crying and telling the policeman that he couldn’t take Mom to jail because my brothers were only one year old and I was only five and I couldn’t drive them home yet. The officer and my mom were laughing—she wasn’t going to jail—but all I remember thinking was that I had to protect them. While we were as close as brothers could be all through the year, Thanksgiving was the holiday we loved the most, when we spent some of our best quality time together.
When I met my wife, Terry, she started going camping with us. By that point, the Thanksgiving camping tradition had grown to more than forty people who camped for five days, from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after. Instead of tents, almost everyone was now sleeping in campers and fifth wheels.
Despite these luxury upgrades, my wife’s Cuban culture wasn’t really known for camping. I can’t say she has ever really enjoyed it, but she always embraced it because of how special it was for me. Once we had children, especially as they got older, she grew to appreciate the importance of it all.
There is nothing better than getting to watch our three boys in the woods, doing the same things my brothers and I had done together many years before. It’s a total detachment from the rest of the world. The moment they get up in the morning, they each grab an old bicycle and tear off into the trails through the woods. I get to sit around the campfire with my brothers, playing cornhole or cards together, like the old days.
Unfortunately for me, the timing of my trial could not have been worse. As much as I wanted to ignore it and enjoy Thanksgiving with my family, that wasn’t an option. That year, I borrowed a camper and drove it seven hours north from South Florida to a campground just outside Jacksonville, Florida. Usually during car rides, we played music and talked and refereed the usual brotherly bickering in the back seat. This trip was different.
We hadn’t only packed camping gear. I had packed five Bankers boxes of Epstein-related trial materials. My lawyers were back at the office also sacrificing their Thanksgiving with more than sixty Bankers boxes of materials accumulated over the previous decade. Instead of having fun, Terry and I were talking about the trial.
She knew what was at stake. Both of us had been living with this case for more than a decade, and it had a big impact on our lives. And she was understandably annoyed that now it was interfering with this important family time. She was also irritated because her birthday was on December 1, just three days before the trial was supposed to begin, and yet another life event of hers was pretty much going down the drain because of my battle with Jeffrey Epstein. She may not have known it then, and she still may not even know it now, but I couldn’t have gotten through any of this without her.
I was trying to make Thanksgiving as normal as possible under the circumstances. Usually over this holiday I would leave my cell phone in the camper. I got almost no reception in the woods
anyway, so doing that wasn’t very challenging.
This year, however, I had to be available to my attorneys and needed to maintain contact with the various witnesses as we decided on their scheduled appearances. I still tried to limit the amount of time I spent on the cell phone; talking required me to ride my bike to the very front of the campground—more than a mile from our campsite—just to get one bar of reception. I could only go up there two or three times a day, and even that was pushing everyone’s patience.
In between calls, I spent time riding bikes and playing football with my boys, but the reality was that my mind wasn’t there. I spent every second thinking about the upcoming trial. Even at night, sitting around the campfire helping my youngest son cook hot dogs without getting burned, I couldn’t help thinking about the last-minute preparations needed to make sure we won.
Similar to every other trial, I tried to analyze what defense I was most afraid of and how best to plan against it. In this case, the malicious claims Epstein had made about me could now be proven without doubt as false. So that didn’t concern me.
What would I do if I were in his shoes having to defend the case?
I thought back to the mock trial and how I’d defended him. It was late, the fire was burning out, and my uncle was telling me a story about a cruise he had been on where his bathing suit flew completely off when he tried the surf slide. It was funny. But I couldn’t laugh. My mind was only on the case.
Just then, I got a call on my cell phone. 0000000000. I tried to answer but got no reception. I jumped on the bike and pedaled from the campfire to the front of the campground. I didn’t have Epstein’s number—so I had to wait for him to call back, which he did, within minutes.
The call was short, “Brad, Jeff here. I really don’t want to hurt you. I have always fought fair. This is your last chance to end this. You have no damages. The trial will cause you harm and I won’t be able to stop it. We need to find a fair way to stop this.”
He paused, waiting for me to talk. I said, “It’s not about money. You know that. It is about the truth.”
“Fine, then if the truth comes out, the case will end. I’ll work on that. Don’t get fatigued at the end. You have better endurance than that. We have come too far to not finish this the right way,” he said. Not totally clear where he was going, I stayed quiet. “Good night,” he said before hanging up.
Playing his words over in my mind, I knew for sure now that Jeffrey Epstein was going to admit wrongdoing. I had thought this before. But now I knew it was true.
In any civil case such as this, the plaintiff—me—has to prove “liability,” meaning prove that the defendant did something wrong. Also, as noted, I had to prove that I had been damaged as a consequence of that wrong. From the mock trial, I knew that the liability case against him was a guaranteed win, but the damages were a problem.
Epstein knew this, too. There was no way he was going to let us put victims on to testify about his serial molestation of children or the deep investigation I had conducted into it, an investigation that had culminated in his very attack on me that resulted in our case.
It would set in motion the type of unwanted national attention that would put Epstein at criminal risk as well. This phone call from him told me he had thought this through.
Over the years, whenever we got evidence proving that Epstein’s attack had been made with malicious intent, I would get a call from Jeffrey, or a message from one of his attorneys, saying that I should just “walk away from the case” while I still had time. This mantra was designed to make me wonder if I had missed something.
Now there was no longer any time left for him to feign a position of strength. The trial was going to happen. He had run out of ways to stop it. But he did have one option. A good one. He could surrender. He could admit that he had filed a false complaint, thereby precluding me from introducing evidence of his bad acts and restricting the trial to my damages—the weakest part of my case.
I grabbed my phone from the camper and texted Jack, I need to speak with you immediately. It didn’t matter that it was midnight on Thanksgiving Day, after most people had eaten turkey and gone to sleep.
Jack doesn’t sleep much anyway. Over the years, I have talked to him at midnight and then communicated with him by email at four thirty in the morning. He responded by saying that he was up, so I called. “They are going to admit liability,” I said, to which Jack responded, “What are you talking about?”
I laid it out for him. Surrender—or at least partial surrender—was his only option, and it was a good one.
He paused, clearly thinking about what this would mean for our trial. I explained at a rapid pace. “The trial will literally be reduced to three or four witnesses, including me and our expert, whose testimony will be limited to basically the small number of people who could have electronically seen this complaint that Epstein has now admitted to the world was false. If the number is tiny, so are my damages. At least, that’ll be his argument.”
Jack’s initial response was “I do not believe they will do that. But I do agree we should start preparing in case they do.” I left that call worried.
For the rest of the camping trip, I couldn’t get my mind off this ploy. It occupied my time so much I didn’t get to spend any real quality time with my aunts, uncles, or the rest of the family whom I only see this one time of the year, the only time we all come together to be thankful for what we have. I still feel bad about that.
Terry saw that I was uncharacteristically absent from the festivities. On Sunday, I packed up the camper and we began driving home. She encouraged me. “I’ve never seen you like this before. The trial is going to be great. This is what you’ve been wanting for years. Don’t worry about us, it’s all going to be over soon, which is all I want.”
I responded, “That’s not the problem. This isn’t going to be the trial that I always wanted. He’s never going to let that happen. He’s too smart for that.”
I told her what I’d explained to Jack the night before. Always cutting to the chase, she said, “You’re still going to win. You are right. He is wrong.”
As much as this last trick up Epstein’s sleeve had me thinking about the downside, I still thought I was in a much better position than he was. The attention given to the trial would create risk for him that some other prosecutor, in some place outside of Florida, would prosecute him for the crimes he had committed elsewhere. Eventually, he would have to make another move to protect himself from this, and he was running out of time.
Almost as soon as I pulled the camper back into my driveway after a seven-hour trip home, I got an incoming call.
0000000000.
FIFTY-TWO THE HANDSHAKE
EPSTEIN AND I AGREED TO meet in person one last time before the trial. He picked our usual place—Starbucks off Glades Road in Boca.
I was fifteen minutes early and yet he had gotten there first. Of all the tables available, he chose the outside corner table and the chair that I had sat in during my meeting with his bodyguard.
Was this his way of saying that he knew about that meeting? If he did, how did he know this was the table we sat at? Even the chair. We didn’t talk about it, but when I walked up, the look on his face told me his location and positioning were no accidents.
As I approached the table, he leaned back in his chair. As soon as I sat across from him, he started talking. “What I did to you was wrong. I am sorry. I do not believe you have damages. I know you want my apology. I’ll give it to you. It is sincere. Are we done?”
I said, “Okay, but for this to end the case, your apology will have to be as public as the false complaint you filed against me. And it has to be clear. Not a lawyered-up statement nobody can really understand.”
He said, “Fine.” He then apologized. I believed him.
I said, “At this late stage of the game, it has to be in the courtroom.”
He said, “You want me to kiss your ass in Macy’s window?” stealing the famo
us line from Lyndon B. Johnson. Before I could say anything, he said, “Done,” and with that we worked out the other details of the settlement. When that was over, we talked for a bit.
“Did Stan tell you we used to work in the same office in New York?” he asked.
“Yes,” I responded.
“Did he tell you about my date with the girl with two vaginas?”
“He actually did mention that to me at some point,” I confirmed.
He got the biggest smile, before delivering his punch line, “I felt like I was dating a bowling ball.”
I looked at him skeptically and with disapproval for his degrading commentary. Seeing that I was unamused, he pulled out his phone to validate the existence of the anatomical condition as if that would also cure the offensiveness of his joke.
This meeting, this settlement, did in certain ways actually change the hostile relationship between us. Maybe it should not have, but it did. Of course, I still did not like him. I couldn’t. He had hurt many people I had come to care about deeply. It was also clear that he didn’t like me for the way I had come after him, tooth and nail, for more than a decade. Strangely, though, our mutual dislike included a kind of begrudging mutual respect that at this end stage allowed us to talk without jockeying for leverage or advantage.
We had never been in communication without having underlying anger and hostility brewing beneath us. But, at the same time, in ten years of battles, we had grown to know each other almost too well. Sitting there in Starbucks, an outsider might have thought we were old friends. We weren’t. But combat against a formidable warrior bears some form of camaraderie when the guns are finally down. And that’s what this was.
It felt like we were touching gloves after a long boxing match and trading stories about maneuvers we made against one another after the opening bell.
He said, “You should write a book. Make it a movie. I still want to have some input on who plays me when you do a movie one day.”
Relentless Pursuit Page 37