Guilt by Accusation

A Mystery Following Epstein’s Suicide: Why Did David Boies Drop the Ball against Leslie Wexner?

When I was informed that my former client Jeffrey Epstein may have tried to kill himself in jail, I was not surprised. Based on the evidence in the case, it seems apparent that Epstein was a hedonist who cared about his body, his comforts, his pleasures and his well-being. I never saw him drink or use drugs. He ate very little. He worked out. His pleasures obviously focused on sex.

I was surprised that Epstein flew into Teterboro airport while an investigation of him was ongoing. He could easily have remained in Paris where he owned an apartment. I had never seen his Paris condo, but I’m told it was quite beautiful. Had he stayed in France, the US would have sought to extradite him, but it is uncertain whether they would have succeeded. Recall that Roman Polanski, whom I had briefly represented, lived openly in France despite American efforts to extradite him when he fled California following his guilty plea for having sex with an underage girl.

Epstein was probably unaware of the investigation and indictment by the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan. He must have been shocked to be arrested. He must have been even more shocked to see the inside of the federal detention center that would be his new home. I have been in that facility to visit clients, and it is hell on earth even for inmates who are not used to living in the palatial homes that Epstein owned.

When the government opposed his pretrial release, Epstein probably realized that he might never again experience freedom. Prosecutors win the vast majority of their cases and motions, and if convicted he was facing a sentence that would likely keep him imprisoned for the rest of his life. I suspect that he did not see any light at the end of the tunnel, and did not want to spend the next several decades as a federal prisoner. So suicide was an obvious option.

Though I was not surprised when Epstein attempted suicide, I was shocked when, a few weeks later, he succeeded. It is nearly impossible for a prisoner on suicide watch to kill himself. Such prisoners are denied access to any material they could use to hang themselves—belts, shoelaces, sheets etc. They are continuously monitored by guards and video cameras. But Epstein was not only taken off suicide watch, his cell mate was moved and he was left alone and unmonitored with his bedsheets. It is almost as if they were inviting him to hang himself, which he did.

The autopsy confirmed suicide, but there are skeptics, including some of his current lawyers, who were preparing to appeal the denial of bail and to defend him vigorously at trial. There will be investigations, but I doubt there will be hard evidence that he may have been killed by others.

Epstein’s death caused understandable anger among his victims and alleged victims. The judge who was supposed to preside over his criminal case invited his alleged victims—including my false accusers Giuffre and Ransome—to speak in court. Neither mentioned me. On the courthouse steps, Giuffre demanded that Prince Andrew come clean, yet she didn’t dare accuse me because she knew I would sue her if she repeated out of court the perjurious lies she had told in court papers.

Epstein’s death left many unsolved mysteries which should be investigated. At the center of these mysteries is Leslie Wexner. Wexner’s business relationships with Epstein have received considerable attention, but there has been little coverage of their long term personal relationships and the accusations made by Giuffre that Wexner had sex with her, and perhaps others.⁵¹

A deep mystery surrounds the decision by attorney David Boies not to pursue Wexner, to whom, according to Giuffre, she was sexually trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein on multiple occasions while she was underage.⁵² Readers may be unaware of these allegations because Boies deep-sixed them after meeting with Wexner’s lawyer. The question is, why? Did Boies not believe his client’s accusations against Wexner? If he did believe them, did Wexner pay hush money to keep the accusations from becoming public? The answer may lie in the following documented, but suppressed, story that I have asked prosecutors to investigate.

In mid-2014, Giuffre’s original lawyer, a former Assistant Attorney General named Stanley Pottinger, asked Boies to help represent Giuffre. Boies agreed. According to a sworn affidavit filed by Pottinger:

In the fall of 2014, I asked Mr. Boies if the firm represented, or if he knew, Mr. Leslie Wexner. I told him that in the course of investigating facts related to Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking, Mr. Wexner had been identified as a close business associate and personal friend of Mr. Epstein. I told Mr. Boies that there were assertions that Mr. Wexner had permitted Mr. Epstein to use, and entertain on, Mr. Wexner’s yacht, and that Mr. Wexner was alleged to have had sex with one or more of Mr. Epstein’s girls, including Ms. Giuffre. (emphasis added)

The Pottinger affidavit disclosed that in December of 2014—precisely the same time I was being publicly accused in court papers by Giuffre of having had sex with her—Boies’s firm asked to meet with Wexner privately. As previously noted, Boies and his partner then met with Wexner’s lawyer and told him, according to the lawyer, that Giuffre was accusing him of sexual misconduct similar to that of which she was falsely accusing me. As I’ve said, both Wexner’s wife and his lawyer used the word “shakedown” when telling me about Boies’s approach to Wexner. They also said the accusations were untrue. We don’t know precisely what transpired at the secret meeting, but we do know, from the records of the case, that following the meeting, Wexner’s name disappeared from court filings, and no public accusation, of the kind made against me, was ever leveled against Wexner by Boies or his client. In the recently unsealed deposition of Giuffre taken in 2016, she accuses many prominent figures of having sex with her, but not Wexner, though she had earlier accused him in secret.

Wexner’s disappearance from the Epstein cases is surprising, indeed shocking, in light of Wexner’s wealth and long-term personal and business associations with Epstein. Maria Farmer—whose credibility is questionable—has sworn that she was assaulted by Epstein on Wexner’s property, after Wexner hired her to work with him, and that “Wexner’s security staff refused to let [her] leave the property,” where she was “held against [her] will for 12 hours . . .”

As I have repeatedly said, the accusations against me, which were deliberately made public, are refuted by the evidence. Yet they were deliberately made in publicly filed court documents and then leaked to the press in order to gain maximum publicity. Just as these accusations became headline news, Wexner was approached privately with similar accusations. The timing does not appear to be coincidental.

It would be commendable, if Boies had indeed met with Wexner’s lawyers in order to “thoroughly investigate” the accusations, as the Pottinger affidavit claims. If Wexner’s lawyers persuaded Boies that his client was lying about having sex with Wexner, that would be a good explanation for why they would not, thereafter, have publicly accused Wexner. But it doesn’t explain why they continued to publicly accuse me after concluding that the very woman who accused me—the same one who accused Wexner—was a liar, who made up a similar false story about another prominent man.

If, on the other hand, Boies believed that Giuffre was telling the truth about Wexner, why would he possibly have allowed this prominent multi-billionaire to get away with having repeatedly abused his “underage” client? Boies sued Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein on behalf of his clients and received generous settlements from which he received contingency fees. Now Giuffre is suing me, as I will describe in the Chapter 12. Why did he let the mega-wealthiest person most closely connected to Epstein off the hook? Did money change hands?

There is no third possibility: Either Boies concluded that Giuffre was lying about Wexner, in which case she should not be believed about me; or he concluded that she was telling the truth about Wexner, in which case, Boies has to explain why he covered up this billionaire’s serious crimes against his client.

It is, of course, logically possible that Giuffre was lying about Wexner (as well as the Gores, Clinton, her age and other issues) but telling the truth about me. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes wisely observed, “The Life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.”⁵³ And experience teaches that a witness who has falsely accused others and lied about relevant matters should not be believed. Giuffre’s own lawyer, David Boies, acknowledged this when he told me that she was “wrong” about meeting me on the island, ranch and other locations so she could not be believed about meeting me in New York.

Not only did Leslie Wexner’s name completely disappear from the case after his lawyer met with Boies and McCawley, but Giuffre’s lawyers went out of their way to pronounce him innocent of any wrongdoing. Here is how Bradly Edwards, Giuffre’s Florida lawyer, put it when asked on July 16, 2019 whether Wexner was involved with any of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual misconduct:

“I believe based on the information that we have accumulated over 11 years that the statements that he gave yesterday in the press that he did not know about the sexual proclivities of Mr. Epstein are very likely to be true. We have not seen where he is in the company of Jeffrey Epstein at the time he when was engaging in these things. In fact, it is very seldom that any of the victims ever met him or saw him, I know there are a lot of business ties to him but other than receiving any information about their business connection, I don’t have any information to believe otherwise.”

This interview is highly significant, because Edwards was speaking as Giuffre’s lawyer and agent. In doing so, he was admitting—much like Boies has previously admitted—that his own client was a liar and a perjurer. Recall that Giuffre had testified under oath that she had sex with Wexner on numerous occasions, under circumstances nearly identical to the false claims she made about having had sex with me. She has also accused Wexner of making her wear Victoria’s Secret-type lingerie while he had sex with her. Giuffre also told another of her lawyers, Pottinger, that Wexner had sex with her and may have had sex with other women associated with Epstein. But that was all before Boies and McCawley met with Wexner’s lawyers. If, in fact, Wexner paid hush money to buy Giuffre’s silence, then it would be understandable why Edwards was prepared to deny that she had sex with Wexner. But this has the effect of throwing his client under the bus by, in effect, calling her a perjurer for swearing that she did have sex with Wexner.

If Edwards made this dramatic and damming admission because he knows that Giuffre lied about Wexner, then he surely should not have believed her nearly identical false claims about me. This is a deep conundrum for the Giuffre team, and one that may well suggest serious criminal conduct.

And there is more. In a previous interview Edwards said that based on his own 11 years of investigating Epstein related charges he doesn’t “know of any high profile people who would be implicated” in sexual misconduct. So, again, he is calling his client a perjurer because she testified that among the people she was forced by Epstein to have sex with there were many extremely “high profile people” such as George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Ehud Barak and others.

It is, of course, possible that Giuffre’s lawyers are seeking hush money from these and other prominent figures who have been accused by Giuffre, whether falsely or truthfully. Anyone who doubts that Boies and his firm are capable of such tactics need only look at the case of Emma Cline, a young novelist who received the Boies treatment.

Boies and his firm represented the ex-boyfriend of writer Emma Cline, who wrote the acclaimed novel Girls, a fictional account of a woman’s relationship with Charles Manson. The ex-boyfriend, Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, alleged that she stole his writing for her book and invaded his privacy via a spyware program named Refog installed on her laptop. Reetz-Laiolo had use of her computer during their relationship, and later bought it from Cline after their romance ended.

In an effort to “settle” the case, Boies and his team sent Cline and her lawyers a draft complaint—with Boies’ name—that sought to stop the sale of Girls and a movie deal based on the book.

The draft complaint came with a not-so-veiled-threat of what would happen if no settlement was reached. As The New Yorker reported,

“Boies Schiller responded by sending a hundred-and-ten-page draft of a complaint that it said it was prepared to file in court if the two sides did not reach a settlement. David Boies’s name appeared at the top of it. Reading through the allegations, Cline was stunned to find a section titled “Cline’s History of Manipulating Older Men,” which purported to illustrate how Boies Schiller would easily discredit her arguments about her former boyfriend’s treatment of her before a jury. “[E]vidence shows that Cline was not the innocent and inexperienced naïf she portrayed herself to be, and had instead for many years maintained numerous ‘relations’ with older men and others, from whom she extracted gifts and money,” the section began. What followed were thirteen pages containing screenshots of explicit chat conversations with lovers, including one in which Cline had sent a naked photo of herself (the photo was blacked out in the letter) to a boyfriend, explicit banter with people she’d met online, and snippets of her most intimate diary entries. All of this material had been recorded by the spyware and remained on Cline’s old laptop, which Reetz-Laiolo now had in his possession.”

In their counter complaint⁵⁴, Cline’s lawyers minced no words in describing Boies Schiller’s tactics.

His [Reetz-Laiolo’] allegations follow a pattern that started during their relationship – and apparently fits with the playbook of his counsel – of prying into and exploiting Cline’s sexual history to threaten her, even going so far as to make the false and absurd claim that she was an “escort.” Reetz-Laiolo and his counsel’s extreme and aggressive campaign against Ms. Cline moved into farce when they implied that Reetz-Laiolo’s damages from his “injuries” could approach “billions” of dollars.”

As with Giuffre, it was only after Reetz-Laiolo met lawyers from the Boies Schiller law firm that he apparently hatched a plan to turn a frivolous and time-barred legal claim into a big-day payout:

“Because of the Refog program, which had captured and stored records of Cline’s computer activity while she owned the computer, Reetz-Laiolo has been in possession of a trove of personal information about Cline since he purchased her computer in 2013, including her private correspondence, journal entries, intimate web browsing history, and photographs… However…even after he discovered the Refog program, Reetz-Laiolo did not immediately understand the extent of what he had in his possession. It was only in 2016, after he began to realize the weakness of his copyright claims against Cline, that Reetz-Laiolo realized he could exploit this trove of Cline’s most personal information. Thereafter, in keeping with his long history of using extortionate threats to control. Cline, Reetz-Laiolo hatched a plan to exploit this information to shore up his wilting copyright claims, and extract a financial windfall from Cline and Random House through alternative means… [H]e threatened to reveal her past use of the Refog software not because he believed he had a credible claim, but in order to extort the maximum financial settlement from Cline.”

Although the Boies Schiller law firm knew or should have known that Reetz-Laiolo had no credible legal claim, they went ahead with the lawsuit. As Cline’s lawyer recounted:

On March 30, 2017, Reetz-Laiolo’s counsel followed up on their February 21, 2017 letter with a draft complaint setting out their supposed claims detail (the “First Draft Complaint”). In the First Draft Complaint, Reetz-Laiolo and his counsel went far beyond what would be necessary to set out claims based on Cline’s use of the Refog software and for copyright infringement. The First Draft Complaint made aggressive, transparently threatening use of personal information Reetz-Laiolo had found in the cache of Refog data that he considered most likely to humiliate Cline. [E]mboldened by a perceived legitimate legal “hook,” he and his counsel included in the First Draft Complaint screenshots of Cline highlighting and copying erotic literature from the internet into a document…, alleging that these were a further example of Cline’s “plagiarism.” However, the First Draft Complaint identified no corresponding instance of any language from the cited erotica appearing in any of Cline’s work. These allegations were included in the First Draft Complaint purely to humiliate Cline, and bully her and her publisher into settling for an unreasonable sum rather than have this extraordinarily personal information aired in open court.”

If that was not bad enough, the Boies Schiller firm doubled down in their revised draft complaint:

“A revised draft complaint (the “Second Draft Complaint”)…falsely accused Cline of being an “escort,” and attempted to sexualize and smear her platonic relationship with a benefactor (who it also named). In short, the Second Draft Complaint, with the imprimatur of the Boies Schiller firm, followed an age-old playbook: it invoked the specter of sexual shame to threaten a woman into silence and acquiescence.”

This episode was reported on in The New Yorker⁵⁵ and The New York Times⁵⁶, and Boies Schiller was criticized for its behavior. (David Boies has just been criticized for his role in the Weinstein case.) Legal ethics scholar Professor Stephen Gillers told The New Yorker, “Lawyers can refuse to engage in tactics they find morally repulsive. This is especially true here because the screenshots, even if not entirely extraneous to the dispute, are of barely marginal relevance.”⁵⁷

Boies Schiller’s General Counsel stated that David Boies had no involvement in the matter: “Boies had nothing to do with the draft or filed complaint, but he did participate in one settlement discussion.”⁵⁸ However, while Boies’ name was omitted from the complaint that was filed, the fact that he used his name in the draft complaint was obviously aimed at intimidating Cline and her lawyers. They refused to settle the case. A California judge ruled in Cline’s favor and dismissed Reetz-Laiolo’s lawsuit.⁵⁹

If these tactics sound similar to the ones allegedly used by Boies against Wexner, it is because they derive from the Boies “play-book.”

Epstein’s death will not end the investigations. Among the mysteries that should be explored are whether Giuffre committed perjury when she accused Wexner and other prominent men of having sex with her, or whether Boies engaged in a “shakedown” and/or received hush money for Giuffre to cover up Wexner’s alleged crimes.

55 Sheelah Kolhatkar, How the Lawyer David Boies Turned A Young Novelist’s Sexual Past Against Her, The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2017.

56 Alexandra Alter, Sex, Plagiarism and Spyware: This Is Not Your Average Copyright Complaint, New York Times, Dec. 1, 2017.

57 Sheelah Kolhatkar, How the Lawyer David Boies Turned A Young Novelist’s Sexual Past Against Her, The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2017.