Epstein Scandal: The case against Bondi - she’s been failing paedophile’s victims for years

Key topics:Pam Bondi ignored Epstein’s sex trafficking victims during her tenure.DOJ records on Epstein withheld, fuelling MAGA conspiracy theories.Epstein’s cover-up persists; victims seek justice amid official inaction..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Mary Ellen Klas.Attorney General Pam Bondi’s decision to withhold the Department of Justice’s records on pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have put her in the crosshairs of the MAGA universe this month, but Bondi dropped the ball on investigating Epstein and his sex trafficking co-conspirators long ago. As Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, Bondi was the state’s top prosecutor as lawsuits piled up from Epstein’s victims challenging the secret plea deal that state and federal officials negotiated in 2008. The prosecutors not only allowed Epstein and four of his co-conspirators to be immunised from further prosecution for sexually exploiting women and girls, courts concluded they also illegally hid the agreement from the victims so they couldn’t protest the deal in court.Bondi was elected after Epstein had served his sentence in Palm Beach and quickly tried to establish her office as an advocate for victims of sex trafficking, erecting billboards across the state to bring awareness to the issue, creating the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking and, in her last months in office, announcing a criminal investigation into allegations of past sex abuse by Catholic priests in Florida. “We want to help you if you have been abused,” she said at the time, “and you can stop this from happening to other children.”But Bondi kept her distance from the state’s most prominent sex-trafficking case, even as Epstein’s victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate provisions of his non-prosecution agreement and filed lawsuits alleging he abused them when he was on work release from jail. She may have mastered the press conference, but when it came to powerful millionaires with friends in high places, Bondi’s record was pitiful.In November 2018, the Miami Herald released its investigative series on Epstein, “Perversion of Justice,” and exposed the details of the government’s decision to allow Epstein to bypass federal charges. The reporting also revealed, for the first time, the horrifying stories of many of his victims. Instead of suggesting the state get to the truth, Bondi remained conspicuously silent. Her inaction helped to perpetuate what victims describe as a government cover-up that, along with Epstein’s death, has robbed those victims of their chance to get answers and hold their abusers to account. When Bondi took the top job in the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, she got a second chance to rectify the damage. She could have announced a sweeping internal probe, released the DOJ files in a show of transparency, and revamped the agency so this kind of miscarriage of justice wouldn’t occur again. Instead, she botched it. She again leaned into public relations rather than substance, going on Fox News in February to boast that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk.” She had long capitalised on the MAGA world’s obsession with the records, telling Sean Hannity in January 2024 that the files “should have come out a long time ago,” and blaming it on a “two-tiered justice system.”If Bondi believed any of that, she didn’t act on it. She destroyed every last ounce of independence her office might have had when she went to the White House in May and warned Trump that his name appeared in the Epstein files. Her credibility with Trump’s base tanked further when she and FBI Director Kash Patel — who had also stoked Epstein conspiracy theories for years — concluded that they had “found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials.” To add salt to the victims’ wounds, they also alleged: “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”But “anyone who contends they have reviewed the entire Epstein file could not have possibly overlooked the factual findings,’’ Jack Scarola, a Florida attorney who represents several of Epstein’s victims, told me. “Public statements that there is no evidence supporting anyone else's involvement with Epstein are absolutely false.”If Bondi is interested in protecting anyone involved in this case, however, it doesn’t appear to be Epstein’s victims.For those of us who have watched Bondi’s career, her handling of the Epstein files has been disappointing, but not surprising. In 2013, she dropped an investigation into Trump University after the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 contribution to her political committee. When it comes to the powerful and well-connected, Bondi can talk tough but look the other way.If Bondi had read the Epstein files “on her desk,” she would have seen the details compiled over decades and hidden from public view. She would have seen the 53-page draft federal indictment, and the 82-page memo put together by prosecutors before they were scuttled by former US Attorney Alex Acosta – Trump’s first Labor Secretary in his first term. She could have read the emails in court records that showed how Acosta, working with the Palm Beach County state attorney, agreed to the requests of Epstein’s lawyers not to contact the victims and to “do whatever you can to keep this from becoming public.”She would have seen how prosecutors had sabotaged attempts by police to investigate Epstein’s crimes, and the 2019 order by US District Court Judge Kenneth K. Marra who concluded that “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.”And if Bondi had cared, she would be outraged by the federal government’s cover-up — as alleged in Marra’s order — that concluded that prosecutors not only violated the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act by shielding Epstein from future prosecution, but also misled the victims to think the investigation was still ongoing when they had shut it down.Epstein was found dead in his cell in August 2019. The medical examiner ruled that he hanged himself at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. His death also ended the attempts by his victims to invalidate the secret plea deal. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 7-4 that without Epstein, there were no charges, and therefore no remedy for his victims. As Judge Frank M. Hull wrote in a scathing dissenting opinion, “the Epstein case a poster child for an entirely different justice system for crime victims of wealthy defendants.”Scarola hopes the newfound attention to the case will restore focus on finding justice for the victims. “There has been a perpetual acceptance of the coverup,” he told me. He believes the reason that “indisputable facts have been largely ignored” is because “something else was pushing back.”Scarola doesn’t have any theories as to who or what might be working to keep the victims from justice, but he does believe that Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell “holds keys that are capable of unlocking the boxes in which many of these secrets have been hidden.” But, he added, it will require prosecutors to really study the case and do “a thorough investigation.” Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of child sex trafficking in 2021. Congressional leaders said they will subpoena her to testify next month. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche this week is interviewing her, but even the DOJ has called Maxwell a serial liar and Blanche arrived with no FBI agents or frontline prosecutors who could check her claims.Bondi and her DOJ have demonstrated they know how to grab headlines and divert attention in service to the president. A better use of their time would be to listen to the victims instead of the pedophile, and make sure there will be no more Epsteins..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Epstein Scandal: The case against Bondi - she’s been failing paedophile’s victims for years

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