Marie Villafaña, a federal sex-crimes prosecutor in South Florida, had spent a year listening to teen girls detail how Jeffrey Epstein had recruited and paid them for sex acts at his Palm Beach mansion. He was a danger to children, she told her bosses in May 2007, and begged them to urgently seek his arrest by the FBI.
She proposed a 60-count indictment that charged Epstein and some of his assistants with sex trafficking and other crimes. Her supervisors — Alex Acosta, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and his criminal chief, Matthew Menchel — didn’t act.
Two weeks later, Villafaña pressed her case again. Epstein was flying from the Virgin Islands to New Jersey, she wrote. They should arrest him immediately. This time, Menchel delivered the verdict: Request denied.
“I’m having trouble understanding — given how long this case has been pending — what the rush is,” he told Villafaña in an email. Acosta, he went on, “wants to take his time making sure he is comfortable before proceeding.”
These exchanges and other new details of a fierce internal debate nearly two decades ago over whether and how to prosecute Epstein are chronicled in the documents released by the Department of Justice. Villafaña, 57, declined to comment for this story. But the documents make public for the first time her detailed first-hand account, written in 2019, of her efforts to persuade the US Attorney’s Office to bring charges. They also reveal emails between Menchel and Epstein years after the now-infamous agreement that protected him from federal prosecution in 2007.
I draw, code, and make memes sometimes.