OUR TEAM WAS WORKING HARD to make sure we stayed focused on what mattered. Virginia Roberts had important revelations that should not be silenced. While Epstein and his entourage were looking to shut her down, she was determined to be heard. She was confident in the truth and in putting an end to Epstein’s abusive clan who had chased her out of the country years earlier and no doubt had continued to leave a trail of victims in its wake. To accomplish her goal, she needed airtime on a major network.
We began putting feelers out and all were interested. Because ABC’s Jim Hill was an adept investigative reporter who understood the complexities of the case far better than anyone else, and because Virginia really liked Amy Robach, the ABC anchor committed to the story, we chose ABC.
We met with ABC personnel prior to April 2015 when we flew with Virginia to New York for the taping of her full-story interview with Amy. David Boies’s partner Sigrid McCawley, Stan, Virginia, and I worked with the ABC team to make sure they had everything they needed. Virginia’s interview was powerful. The Epstein organization was finally going to be exposed. There would be no more abuse. Light was going to be shed on the expansiveness of the abuse. Moreover, ABC was going to publicize the sweetheart deal Epstein and his co-conspirators got in Florida and reveal how the government mistreated the Florida victims.
Amy was prepared, and Virginia’s chemistry with her could not have been better. We were told on the set it was one of the best interviews anyone had seen and would air on Good Morning America first before airing on one of their longer platforms. After being strung along for weeks, we were finally told that because Virginia talked about her interactions with Prince Andrew, the network had to reach out to the British royal family and also to an attorney for Epstein since nearly the entire story discussed the inner workings of the Epstein sex-trafficking organization.
For some reason, both presented a problem for ABC. We were not told much, other than the network was scared that they would lose access to the royal family if they aired the interview. We were also told that Alan Dershowitz returned requests for comment by Jeffrey Epstein, and that whatever he said contributed to their apprehension to put Virginia on air. For whatever reasons, ABC never aired the interview, which deeply frustrated those closest to the story, including Amy and Jim.
(More than four years later, after Epstein’s sexual abuse was widely reported by many other networks, Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic on set expressing her frustration over that lost opportunity: “I’ve had the story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air. First of all, I was told, who’s Jeffrey Epstein. No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story. Then the Palace found out that we had her whole allegation about Prince Andrew and threatened us in a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that also quashed the story.… I tried for three years to get it on to no avail. And now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations. And I freaking had all of it.… Brad Edwards, the attorney, three years ago saying, like there will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known.”)
Before, during, and after Virginia’s interview with ABC, we were still dealing with the sideshow that Alan Dershowitz was creating. It wasn’t all bad, though. As a direct consequence of him going on national news, more witnesses continued to come forward. People called from New York, Paris, New Mexico, and all over the world, helping us to build our case. As we were sifting through the calls about Epstein and his misdeeds, we were also now getting calls about Dershowitz himself. Most of them had nothing to do with any of the litigation that we were involved in, some were actually funny, some I wish I could forget.
A neighbor from Dershowitz’s condo building in Miami called to recount in great detail how she would witness Dershowitz dress in a way to hide his identity while he walked the beach to look at topless girls sunbathing near their condo. Because of this behavior, the woman told Dershowitz’s wife that he was a pervert. She claimed that in response Dershowitz got in her face and threatened her, forcing her to go to the police in fear for her safety. To confirm her account, we ordered the police report she said she filed. And there it was. She had told the police that Dershowitz said, “You don’t know what I am capable of,” and “You are going to be so sorry that you said that to my wife.”
Other people telephoned to tell us how they had seen Dershowitz skinny-dipping on Martha’s Vineyard. One Vineyard resident recalled walking up to a volleyball game where Dershowitz was playing nude.
Calls continued to come in fast and furious and some from very important witnesses, most of whom we went to meet in person, although because of the volume we didn’t always get to everyone before the caller changed his or her mind about cooperating. Some people had information about not only Epstein or Dershowitz but also other powerful figures, and these callers were usually nervous.
On one occasion we heard from a former Harvard student who was living in New York. She told me how in 2004, a friend of hers had brought her to Little Saint James and Epstein was there with underage girls. She was very frightened to share the information, but ultimately revealed that she had been to Epstein’s island twice. She wasn’t only scared of Epstein but also of his very powerful friends. She knew of at least one heavyweight politician who was close with Epstein who had received erotic massages from young females provided by Epstein.
We talked several times. She wanted to share more but was scared to death. In most instances—in probably all but this one—I gained the trust of the various witnesses who came forward and could put them at ease. But this witness was different, perhaps understandably so. She had a career with everything to lose and nothing to gain, as she put it. Before I left Florida to meet her in New York, she called to say she’d changed her mind about cooperating. Realizing the importance of her information, especially as it corroborated generally the concept Virginia had advanced of Epstein lending his girls out to other powerful men, I sent an investigator to see her. Apparently, his approach was bad, and the witness called to tell me she was afraid for her life and never wanted to talk about this again.
While I have some educated guesses, I still don’t know who the politician was. But over the years, we heard from numerous witnesses, including victims themselves, about various powerful friends of Epstein reaping the erotic massage benefits of that friendship, although it seemed most of those friends stayed clear of the girls who were underage.
The summer of 2015 was the summer I nearly stopped sleeping altogether. I was coaching two of my sons’ football teams, was embroiled in two personal lawsuits (suing Epstein in one that was still ongoing after six years, and Dershowitz in the other), and was also running a busy litigation firm.
In June, I was preparing for a long, fairly high-profile wrongful-death trial representing the husband of a pregnant woman who was hit by a drunk driver while she sat in a hotel cabana (yes, the car drove through the cabana), killing her and her unborn child. As with any case, I put all others out of my mind so that my total focus was on the trial at hand, although this was especially difficult to do. As I walked to and from the courtroom every day, I was frequently asked by lawyers and judges about the public assault Dershowitz had launched on me, the lawsuit I’d filed against him, my pursuit of justice for Epstein’s victims, and how each was affecting the others. I made a conscious effort not to allow the hallway chatter to impact my trial.
After a very emotional three-week trial, the jury returned a verdict in my client’s favor for $24 million. The verdict provided some justice for the family, which, as inadequate as it was given the terrible loss, was all I could help provide. Trials are emotionally draining, not only on the plaintiffs, but on the lawyers as well. To recover, I usually try to take a few days off afterward, but this time I couldn’t. I had already lost valuable time. There was no choice but to immediately turn back to Epstein (and Dershowitz).
An important decision on my malicious prosecution claim against Epstein was scheduled to come down any day. There was a lot on the line. If the court decided in Epstein’s favor and ruled that malicious prosecution was no longer a recognized claim in Florida (the Wolfe v. Foreman case referred to earlier), Epstein would almost immediately proceed to get a judgment against me in the millions of dollars. He and Dershowitz would then be in a great position to band together once again and go on the attack to finish me off.
While the appellate court had not ruled in my case, it did come down with a decision in a different case that raised the same issue. And the ruling looked good for me. The Fourth District Court of Appeal had disagreed with the Wolfe v. Foreman opinion that Epstein had used against me—the one that essentially abolished malicious prosecution as a claim in Florida. All of that legal jargon just meant that I was likely back in the game. Sure, there were some minor distinctions between the cases, but for the most part the central issue was the same—a person could be sued for malicious prosecution for filing a knowingly false complaint against another person, as Epstein had done to me. The tide had shifted heavily in my favor.
In light of that opinion, the trial court in my case ordered Epstein and me to attend a mediation in advance of any ruling from the appellate court. When a case is decided by a higher court that may change the outcome of other cases affected by the higher court’s new decision, a trial court will often make the parties try to settle their differences, in light of the changed law, thereby hoping to avoid a long and expensive trial.
It was a strange time for mediation because, on the one hand, the trial court’s order dismissing my case had not been overturned by a higher court. Thus, if a higher court upheld the trial court’s decision in an appeal, it was I who would owe Epstein many millions as payment for his attorney’s fees. On the other hand, in light of this new higher court decision on a similar case, the appeal in my case against Epstein looked as if it was going to go in my favor, in which case my malicious prosecution action would be reinstated. Given the egregious nature of his conduct against me, he would be the one at risk of losing big. This all created an interesting negotiating dynamic.
In every mediation that I had ever been in, the mediator sat at the head of a large table with one party on one side and the other party on the other. When we arrived at this mediation in Palm Beach, we found the mediator in the lobby and began walking to the large conference room where the parties would meet for the opening introduction and statements. Lining one side of the table were half a dozen lawyers representing Epstein. The seat at the head of the table, usually reserved for the mediator, who would command the room and run the meeting, was occupied. Leaning back in the mediator’s chair, wearing a tie, one leg folded over the other, his hands intertwined on his lap, was Jeffrey Epstein. “Is this,” he asked as we entered, “where I’m supposed to sit?”
The most startling thing about his presentation was not his preemptive move on the mediator’s seat but the fact that he was wearing a tie. This had more meaning than anyone other than I would understand. This was a guy who was once quoted saying that he never had to be anywhere. He spent his life in sweatpants and monogrammed pullover sweatshirts, refusing to accept most societal norms. Yet here he was wearing a tie, feigning respect. But this was not a show of respect.
I looked at his tie a little closer and saw that it was extraordinarily short, extending just beyond the second button from the top. It looked like a seven-year-old’s tie. He was giving the impression of respect while also making a mockery of the typical mediation or lawyer’s attire. He loved to make fun of lawyers—how stupid they are, how they are always slaves to their clients. Making fun of the lawyer’s monkey suit was just another of his childish jabs. Ironically—because I, too, wanted Jeffrey to know that he was not getting undue respect from me—I showed up in jeans and no tie.
The mediator quickly relocated Epstein and took his spot at the head of the table, with the lawyers closest to him and the clients—Jeffrey and me—at the end across from one another. The mediator started the same way that every mediator starts, by explaining the benefits of mediation and the unpredictability of trial. Before he began, Jeffrey and I locked eyes. Initially, both equally strong and almost simultaneously in response to what sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher in the background, we rolled our eyes at each other as if to say, This guy knows nothing about either one of us, or what we have gone through to get here.
Unconventionally, before any of our lawyers could speak, I said, “We don’t need to spend any more time. There is nothing that anyone is going to say in this room that is going to change the mind of anyone else who matters in this room. I speak for myself, and also, I know in this regard, I speak for Jeffrey as well. If any differences will ever be resolved between the two of us, lawyers are not going to help.”
Before I could finish, Jeffrey chimed in, “I agree.”
The mediator asked what we recommended. I stood up and said, “We’ll be back.”
Jeffrey and I got up and walked to another room. Entering, we saw a table to the left with drinking glasses lined up. Jeffrey turned to me and said, “We should just start breaking the shit out of all of these glasses and make everyone think we’re killing each other.” I laughed. We sat at the small table in the room across from one another for thirty minutes or so.
There was this unspoken understanding we had with each other: after I truthfully answered one of his questions, it was his turn to do the same. He knew which witnesses I had spoken with, and also hinted that it was unlikely many of those people would give me any more information. I reminded him that I could still subpoena those I had already interviewed for trial. “Like you did with Jean-Luc?” he retorted.
“Speaking of Jean-Luc, I hear he’s suing you. What’s that about?” I took my chance to test whether that lawsuit was an Epstein concoction.
“It’s stupid,” he said with a dismissive poker face. He shifted the subject. “What about Ghislaine, are you going to leave her alone?”
I replied, “Only if you tell me everything I want to know about what you did, where you did it, and who you did it with. If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask Ghislaine. She has to know, since she’s probably the one who created you.”
We traded off this way while approximately a dozen lawyers who did not like one another sat awkwardly in the room, waiting for one or both of us to emerge. We got nowhere. The meeting ended with Epstein saying that he knew I wanted him to be arrested. “Since that will never happen, Brad, I strongly suggest we be done with each other. You drop all the cases and just go away,” he said.
“We will continue to agree to disagree about how this is going to end,” I responded quickly, and got up to leave.
“Is this the Brad Edwards negotiating method?” he said as he laughed and rocked back in his chair before rising to stand. Before we left the room, he said, “Let me think about this and I’ll be in touch. Don’t you think we should throw at least one of these glasses at each other before we leave the room?” getting me to laugh one last time.
We walked back to the main mediation room together and announced that we had not been able to resolve the case, or anything else, for that matter. But there was one more surprise before Epstein’s team left. Just then, the process server we had hired to serve Jeffrey Epstein for another deposition walked in and served a subpoena on him. His lawyers were furious, yelling that they would seek sanctions for us using a mediation to get Epstein into a room where we could serve him with a subpoena. Jack and I just grinned as we left.
Epstein called a week later. “We need to resolve our case,” he said, speaking about our personal lawsuit. He continued, “But this Dershowitz thing is making things complicated for me. I don’t care about him, but it drags me in. It needs to be resolved, too. And all of the cases involving me need to be resolved.” The last comment was his way of saying that he wanted to find a way to settle the CVRA case, but he knew it was risky for him to say that directly, so he chose those words carefully. “I’m always honest with you. I always fight fair with you. I never use my full resources against you, but it is getting to a point where you are leaving me little choice.”
“I will not talk to you about the CVRA case,” I told him first.
“Understood,” he said.
“With Dershowitz, I want you to be honest with me and answer some questions about him and others,” I said as a condition precedent.
“What do you want to know?” he offered.
“Tell me the names of all of your friends who had sex with your girls,” I asked first. When he didn’t respond, I sensed that maybe that question overstepped his invitation. So I rattled off a series of narrower questions: “How many of your friends did you send Virginia Roberts to? Was Alan Dershowitz one of those friends?”
“I can’t answer any of these questions. You know that,” he said.
“If you’re not going to answer these basic questions, then I don’t see us getting anywhere,” I finished.
“For now,” he responded before abruptly hanging up.
Epstein always had the ability to resolve all of the civil cases with the exception of the CVRA. But he could not bring himself to do so on my terms. The civil litigation was what gave me subpoena power and the ability to investigate and take depositions. He could have stopped all of that by paying plaintiffs for the damage he caused. But he didn’t.
At several points, he made offhand comments about finding the litigation interesting and equating it to a complex chess game. He enjoyed the “offense and defense of it all.” These types of comments, coupled with the knowledge that he had the financial ability to end any one of these “games” instantly, made me think that in some Br’er Rabbit “don’t throw me in the briar patch” fashion, he wanted to be discovered. No doubt, he did not want to be punished, but he loved letting the world know that he made his own unconventional rules and that the laws of our society did not apply to him.
Now, though, he was getting nervous. Not only was I discovering a lot more information than he wanted me to know, but the Dershowitz thing had amplified the public attention on his activities in a bad way. The situation was running the risk of crossing over from the game he liked playing, where people would admire his unconventional lifestyle of constant erotic massages, to people paying close attention to the details, which included illegalities that could not be forgiven. He didn’t want me to continue to investigate him, track down or subpoena witnesses, or collect more incriminating information, yet he also did not want to give in to my demands that would allow him to avoid those things.
It was hard to pin him down on why he was so hardheaded. He seemed to know that dragging out these cases, which were becoming more of a problem for him by the minute, ran the risk of exposing other crimes he had committed in other jurisdictions. In fact, we talked about that. But when I would tell him why he needed to resolve all cases on my terms, he would end the conversation abruptly, sometimes hanging up without much warning and other times making sure to tell me why he thought my proposed resolutions were not “fair” to him. He and I clearly had a different understanding of the word.