Via America’s Lawyer: Trial Magazines Editor Farron Cousins joins Mike Papantonio to walk us through allegations that Epstein had actually sexually abused victims DURING his Florida jail sentence. His “sweetheart deal” brokered by U.S. labor secretary Alex Acosta had granted Epstein generous work leave from county prison, allowing him up to 12 hours a day unmonitored.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: According to a lawyer for victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire actually continued to abuse women during his lenient prison sentence a decade ago. Joining me to talk about this is Farron cousins from the trial lawyer magazine. The list continues. The story gets crazier by the day. We start off with Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton. These are all people kind of part of the circle. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs, Michael Bloomberg, Harry Weinstein, Tina Brown used to own the daily beast. Les Wexner.
All of these people now, as this story grows, that list is expanding more and more of people who knew exactly what happened. Now, the first thing that happened is the, the sentencing for this guy was an absolute joke. Talk about it. What happened in, when he was on probation down here in Florida?
Farron Cousins: Well what we’re finding out now from a attorney, Brad Edwards down in south Florida, who’s been phenomenal on this case from the beginning. He’s one of the big reasons the Miami Herald even came out with that story a few months ago that really reopened this whole thing. But he said recently, and the daily beast reported that his clients, you know, people associated with him as well, say that Epstein continued abusing them even while he was serving his prison sentence. So when he was allowed to leave that jail from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM every single day, according to these women, they would still be abused by Epstein.
And the interesting development here is that you have the sheriff’s office down there who says, no, there’s no way this could have happened. We had a guard there the whole time. People had to sign in and out. He couldn’t even leave the office for lunch because if he ever left, that would have been a violation of his work release. So then you have the Palm Beach Post that comes out and says, okay, well, Mr. Sheriff’s office, you say you didn’t allow him to leave.
What about the one time you found him wandering the streets drenched in sweat? That wasn’t allowed, but you let it happen? Or the time when he was on probation and he was supposed to be at his home. You show up, car peels out of the driveway and you just say, oh well, we’ll come back later. And because you couldn’t id him in the car, you say he wasn’t violating the terms. This may have violated the terms of his work release constantly.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And they did nothing.
Mike Papantonio: Let, let’s break that down. The judge, of course in the pending case says no bail. Great decision by the judge. There was no reason to give this guy bail. He, you know, as we’ve talked about, he had a safe at home, cash in it, diamonds, a passport to Saudi Arabia with some, with a false name on it. He’s getting ready to leave the country. He had come back from France and we know in France that he owns a place there in France. It’s pretty clear to what he’s setting up for. It’s, it’s the Roman Polonsky deal all over again. So the judge says, no, we’re going to have, we’re not going to grant that.
You know what was interesting to me, all these facts that you’re giving us about what happened in Florida, those didn’t even have to come to light for this judge to understand what a risk this man is. But as I, as I listened to that story, the most troublesome thing is, is the people who were supposed to be guarding him, people don’t realize this, they had the same deal that he was offering in New York and that is, well, I’ll pay for my guards.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I’ll pay for the cost. Whatever the costs are, I’ll pay these fees. So the guards, obviously they were being paid all right. They were being paid to look the other way. Is that basically what you conclude in all this?
Farron Cousins: I mean, that’s the only logical conclusion you can come to at this point because yes, down in south Florida his, his off duty police officer that would guard him every day, Epstein’s the one who footed the bill for that. So it’s very difficult when you say, well, one, I’m not even on duty. This is the guy who’s paying me. If I lose this gig, I lose a lot of money. So it would, it would be in my best financial interest to look the other way or to maybe tell somebody and again, you know, we don’t know that this happened. We’ll find out soon, but maybe say, you know what, don’t sign your name on this log. I have to turn this back in.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Just go in.
Mike Papantonio: Miami Herald, I got to tell you sometimes we’re so down on corporate media for the obvious reasons. Miami Herald did a wonderful job with this and Brad Edwards, the lawyer that you talk about earlier. They are, they’re the people that said, you know, there’s something that smells so bad here. Brad Edwards, I, most people don’t even understand he did this with no, he didn’t even have a contract. I mean he had a, a work relationship. He had no expectation of being paid. He had declared it as pro bono work, voluntary work.
And so he, he actually gets this thing moving and then good journalists, I mean real journalists, not top of the page journalists like we see so often. Good journalist’s get ahold of this story and they start breaking it open. Now the thing that they’re looking at now is the probation part of it. Let’s move to that. Okay. The, we know the officer’s had some relationship to where he just did whatever he wanted to do. He would show up in this posh little apartment that’s connected to the jail.
He would leave anytime he wanted to. He had fax machines, computers, he had everything he needed right there. I mean, life was good. So the next part of it though is even more troublesome and that is so he makes these deals with, with the cops and that’s how he gets by. But the next, the next part of it is where the judge, where, where he’s on probation. Okay. He’s on probation. What happens on probation?
Farron Cousins: Well, he’s supposed to not leave Palm Beach. That’s part of the deal. You’re staying here. You’re not going anywhere else. Okay, well we’ll let you go to New York and you’re not going to have to check in. You’re not even going to have to let us know that you’re going. Oh, you want to go to Boston? Okay, sure. That happened too. Oh, you want to fly back and forth from your private island as much as you want? We’re gonna allow that too. Basically when they put him on probation, they only checked in with him when he wanted them to check in. It’s like the entire city of Palm Beach were employees of Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, that’s what we’re looking at here. That’s how much power he had over them.
Mike Papantonio: Basically, they were employees. I mean, go down to the probation department, go down to the police that were involved. It was, you spread out enough money. We don’t even know whether there was access to these women. I mean, we really don’t know what he was doing. Was he flying them to pedophile island, pedophile island? We don’t have any idea. But the good news because of the work of Brad Edwards and the work of the Miami Herald, now we can unravel this story little by little. Now as, as this develops, the thing that I’ve been so amazed at is how Madame Maxwell has really not been charged yet.
Now there, I’m sure there’s a good reason. I don’t know what it is right now. If I’m looking at the facts, two people as we just talked about, two people said this is what Maxwell did. She participated in these, in the sexual conduct with Epstein. She raped me. Maxwell raped me right along with Epstein. Two different people, two different stories and there was a third person that told a similar story, but at least two people sued her and they sued her for trafficking. Okay. What ended up happening was the settlement took place. She walks like nothing ever happened. The, the files are sealed.
Now this really bothers me. Some judge had to hear the facts and then said, it’s okay to seal the, this file without taking any extra, without taking any action. The judge could have picked up the phone and said, these are sealed, but you need to know what happened. They didn’t do that. The judge did nothing in that regard. The judge had a responsibility to say, here are the facts. Now these facts are going to come out to the public and just a couple of weeks is my prediction. Again, because the Miami Herald did their job. They told this judge, how dare you, how dare you seal this kind of information from the public? What’s your take on that?
Farron Cousins: I think Maxwell will eventually go down. You know, but there’s also another part of it. Maxwell in addition to, to being accused of some of these same things Epstein did. She also, as you talked about earlier, she wants to maintain this lifestyle. Epstein goes down, she can’t maintain it. She flips on him and flips on everybody else associated with it because she’s just as close to them as Epstein, then maybe she can get a lucrative book deal. She can get a movie deal. She can get something that’s going to put her back in that lifestyle and she will jump at that opportunity.
Mike Papantonio: And she is the, she’s the person that’ll do it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Look, thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: No problem.
