South Florida federal prosecutors pitched a 60-count indictment of Jeffrey Epstein on charges including child prostitution and sex trafficking in the late-2000s — but fretted that their case would be undone by some of the pedophile’s alleged victims, according to newly released files.
The Justice Department made public 20 additional documents related to the disgraced financier Thursday evening, including for the first time memos laying out the aborted Florida case against Epstein, who died in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on separate sex trafficking charges.
Three memos drafted by the office of then-South Florida US Attorney Alex Acosta suggested taking Epstein into custody as early as May 2007 and seeking the seizure of his Palm Beach, Fla. home and two private jets. However, the documents also outlined lines of attack that would be used by Epstein’s all-star legal team to place reasonable doubt in the minds of a potential jury.
Top of the list of potential weaknesses was the girl whose parents initially flagged Epstein’s proclivities to the Palm Beach Police Department in 2005.
“Copies of a MySpace page credited to [redacted] were provided to the State Attorney’s Office and to our office,” reads the “possible credibility challenges” section from a February 2008 version of the prosecuting memo. “On that page, [redacted] states that she is 21 years’ [sic] old, she drinks and has taken drugs, she shoplifts, and she earns $250,000 each year. The MySpace page also shows a picture of [redacted] wrestling with her boyfriend and a photograph of a naked girl lying on a beach … During her first sessions with the police, she also minimized what happened with Epstein, denying that he touched her.”
The memo then sought to address each of those concerns, noting that the accuser denied the MySpace page was hers — a claim investigators could neither confirm or refute — and adding that prosecutors had secured two experts to testify that sex abuse victims “minimize what happened to them until they feel more secure about the interviewer.”
Another accuser was flagged for having “brought several girls to Epstein’s home — knowing that they were underage — and she has been given immunity for her testimony,” while a third was mentioned as a credibility risk after an arrest while a juvenile for “marijuana possession and shoplifting.”
In the 2008 memo, prosecutors noted that a fourth victim had given testimony to a state grand jury, during which she “exhibited no hostility towards Epstein and said that she testified only because she was subpoenaed to appear.
“Her statements are well corroborated by the telephone records, etc.,” prosecutors said of this accuser, “but, as with the other girls, her past is not pristine.”
Appearing before the House Oversight Committee in September 2025, Acosta told lawmakers that securing a guilty verdict against Epstein would have been a “crapshoot.”
“Ultimately … we just wanted the guy to go to jail,” he said of a much-derided non-prosecution agreement that saw Epstein serve fewer than 13 months on a state charge of soliciting sex from a minor, with much of that time spent on work release.
“Many victims refused to testify. Many victims had changing stories. All of us understood why they had changing stories, but they did. And defense counsel would have — cross-examination would have been withering,” Acosta added.
“Many of them had issues in their background. They had MySpace pages; they had priors that would’ve been used against them by defense counsel. And that was a time when, in all candor, defense could be much, much tougher on victims on the stand.”
With the non-prosecution agreeement, Acosta said: “We put him in jail, he registered as a sex offender, and the victims had an opportunity to recover. And that was a win.
“Looking at all of this, the ultimate judgment was, ‘Do you roll the dice?’ and if he gets away with it, you’re sending a signal to the community that he can get away with it.”
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