News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Just a reminder that Maxwell's criminal trial transcripts are online as a part of the Epstein files release:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/court-records/united-states-v-maxwell-no-120-cr-00330-sdny-2020
If you've never read a jury trial transcript before, try it, they're very readable and usually in doublespaced lines, as these are. If you want to skip all the lawyer stuff, search for the word jury to find where the jury is excused and then brought back in.
I've been reading these and many of the other related filings, and what has been most striking to me is the depth and breadth of the corruption throughout the legal arm of the state of Florida, and how it wasn't the cops but the US Attorneys and their counterparts who consistently worked much harder to hide and minimize evidence and help the defendant avoid real prosecution than they ever did to bring an obvious criminal to justice.
This happened countless times, not only in 2007/2008 when the US Attorney's Office from the Southern District of Florida were working directly with Epstein's lawyers to find him a misdemeanor he could plead to in order to keep it all quiet, and actively planning with each other how to downplay the number of victims so that the judge wouldn't notice it wasn't just one girl in order to get the non-prosecution agreement approved, but the extent to which they all worked together -- Epstein, his attorneys, AND the state of Florida -- to hide what they were doing from the court and from the victims themselves, in open violation of federal law, so that Epstein could walk away with a slap on the wrist and neither the victims nor their attorneys would have the opportunity to shoot down that sweetheart deal.
These ADAs were so corrupt that they even had FBI agents meet with three of the known 34 victims the day AFTER Epstein had signed the non-prosecution agreement just to create the appearance of an ongoing investigation, when in reality it was already well closed and this was only a containment effort.
And all of this is in the files. Not some reporter's quick skim, but the actual emails*** where the AUSAs are pandering to Epstein's legal team so as to accommodate all their requirements and requests in regard to keeping Epstein happy and out of jail. It's sickening as fuck to see the actual letters and emails of the people society entrusts with prosecuting crime working hand in hand with this criminal to evade even the appearance of justice.
Keep in mind that Pam Bondi was the state Attorney General in Florida from 2011 to 2019, so she was a big part of this ongoing effort to keep Epstein out of jail in Florida as well.
Similarly, when Epstein was finally arrested in 2019 in New York (United States v. Epstein, No. 1:19-cr-00490 (S.D.N.Y. 2019)) his attorneys tried a similar song and dance in their efforts to get him pretrial release, but this time the judge shot them down. This included one assistant US Attorney who tried to downplay Epstein's sexual offender rating so that Epstein could avoid remand, but instead of the friendly cooperation that got in Florida, this attorney got an earful from the judge for it. It was great to see. All of the NY pretrial stuff is pretty juicy, like where his attorneys are continually hiding any real description of his assets but asking that the judge release him on bail anyway and the judge is calling it out: the real joy is watching his attorneys repeatedly lie and get shot down for it.
Another thing that is in the court records are the deposition transcripts, where victims are interviewed under oath, many for the defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislane Maxwell. The defendants paid teams of attorneys to just verbally batter these woman, but they held strong. A good example of this was the deposition of Sarah Ransome, and separately the deposition of Virginia Giuffre herself, where after being strong-armed by the defendant's attorney to give info on another underage victim, her own attorney tells her not to answer, and the interrogating attorney actually uses this verbal pressure as a threat (page 33; I've added the implied names):
This is the threat: after what looks like around an hour of repeated arguing, the deposing attorney is challenging Virginia's decision to take her own attorney's advice, in effect saying, "Are you sure? Because we can and will bring you back for this and more of the same." Whereupon Virginia replies,
These women are fierce, but they had to endure FAR more from the defendants and their combined armies of attorneys than anyone is talking about. This verbal harassment went on to such a degree, especially for Sarah Ransome, that Virginia's attorney submitted a separate filing just to address this and ask the judge to order the deposing attorneys to lay off.
TL;DR: If you haven't looked through the court files but you're curious, they are full of surprises. And you don't have to be an attorney to read and make sense of them.
***These emails and letters are exhibits from the CVRA lawsuit brought against the government in 2016 by Brad Edwards, one of the attorneys representing the victims. To view them, look at all the pdfs that have 361 and 362 in the name: 361 and 362 are the actual complaint, and all of the 361-xx and 362.xx pdfs following are the exhibits to that complaint, including the letters and emails.