Robin Abcarian: With every release of court documents, the damage Jeffrey Epstein did confronts us anew

I could live the rest of my life happily without being reminded of Jeffrey Epstein, his yearslong exploitation of young women or the many famous male moths who were drawn to the billionaire’s flame. I’m sure his emotionally scarred victims wish they could, too.

Recent news developments, unfortunately, make the sordid Epstein saga impossible to avoid. And maybe that’s as it should be, since the lives of so many young women were tarnished by a vile, lecherous creep and his partner who delighted in not just abusing underage girls, but using them to lure high-profile figures into his orbit.

Last week, two more sets of documents related to Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 defamation lawsuit against Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell were released. The judge said she was releasing them because much of their contents are already public knowledge.

The releases Monday and Tuesday were the fourth and fifth document dumps this month and were accompanied by feverish speculation about which bold-faced names would crop up as Epstein associates.

Indeed, dozens of names appear in the files: Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Ron Burkle, David Copperfield, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kevin Spacey, Michael Jackson Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett and Naomi Campbell, among many, many others.

One explosive allegation in the new documents concerns Epstein’s mentor and chief investor, the retail magnate Leslie Wexner. In a 2016 deposition related to a separate defamation case, Giuffre alleged that she was trafficked to Wexner. Wexner has not been charged with a crime, and he has not responded to Tuesday’s revelations. According to ABC News, in 2019, after Epstein was arrested, Wexner told his employees that he was unaware of any of Epstein’s criminal sexual behavior.

Apart from that instance, the judge is right — we’ve already heard bits and pieces of most of what’s in the documents about the predatory Epstein, who was smitten with intellectuals and scientists, collected rich and powerful people as acquaintances and apparently liked to drop names.

In testimony, one of his victims described this predilection: During sexual massages, “he would be on the phone a lot at that time, and one time he said, ‘Oh, that was Leonardo’ or ‘That was Cate Blanchett’ or ‘Bruce Willis.’ That kind of thing.”

Meanwhile, Maxwell, who was convicted in December 2021 of felonies including the sex trafficking of a minor and sentenced to 20 years, resides in a Florida low-­security prison. According to a recent report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, her accommodations are far less pleasant than Epstein’s New York brownstone, private Caribbean island, sprawling New Mexico ranch or the lavish home in New Hampshire where she hid until her arrest in July 2020.

The report said that inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee were served moldy bread, and inspectors found spoiled vegetables and bug-infested cereal in the storeroom.

That is probably cold comfort to Epstein’s victims, including Giuffre, who was recruited by Maxwell in 2000, when she was a 16-year-old locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago. For three years, Giuffre has testified, she was kept as a “sex slave,” flown around the world and “lent out” to high-profile men for sex.

After Epstein killed himself in August 2019 in a New York federal jail cell while awaiting trial, his estate created a victim compensation fund. Its administrator reported in 2021 that the fund had paid more than $121 million to at least 135 of the 225 or so people who made claims.

Because of his suicide, Epstein’s victims will never get the full measure of justice to which they are entitled. And while he and Maxwell’s names will eventually fade — blessedly — from the public discourse, we should never forget the courage it took for Giuffre and others to bring them to justice, nor the lifelong impact their heinous crimes will have on those women.